


Uncharted

by prevaricator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Bisexual Character, F/F, Genderswap, Homophobia, Serious Injuries, all of the exo members are girls, background kim minseok | xiumin/oh sehun, demon hunter tao, mild biphobia, pediatrician junmyeon, workplace bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-23 16:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 55,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9666710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prevaricator/pseuds/prevaricator
Summary: All Junmyeon wants is a simple, peaceful life with the people she cares about. When she asks her best friend's other best friend to be her date to the company party, she has no idea how far out of reach those priorities will become.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This an AU in which everyone in EXO (OT12) has always been a girl, because reasons. I'll be posting a chapter a day after today; the whole story is drafted and edited. It's by far the longest thing I've ever written. I've been working on it in fits and starts since last March. Yikes.
> 
> The prologue is in Tao's POV, but the rest of the story is all in Junmyeon's.

It’s somewhere around one in the morning on Zitao’s second night back in Seoul that she runs into her first demon of this stay. All she’d been looking for when she left her apartment were sleeping pills to help with her jet lag, but between her apartment and the convenience store was a bar. The thing with being a demon hunter is that it’s become habit for Zitao to go out of her way to check out the nooks and crannies around a bar every time she passes one simply because that’s where she tends to catch demons in action the most.

When she peeks into the alley, she sees what looks at first glance like a man and a woman making out against the wall. On closer inspection, the woman’s movements are sluggish, not responsive like those of a woman enjoying a kiss. It could still be date rape, though—Zitao breaks up more of that than she does demon attacks.

She walks softly up the alley, thankful for her choice of sneakers instead of noisier shoes, and as she approaches she spots the telltale faint blue glow around the demon’s mouth.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Zitao snarls. 

Sehun would laugh at the dramatics, if she were here, but Zitao doesn’t see the harm in acting like a comic book superhero if she’s got to _be_ a superhero.

“What does it look like I’m—“ the demon starts, but he must catch a whiff of Zitao’s perfume, because he changes tack. “Oh, it’s the orange blossom girl. I didn’t know you were back in Seoul. You should have called me; I would have liked to have tea with you.”

Zitao’s lip curls. She recognizes the voice as easily as he recognizes her perfume. 

“Would that tea be made of human souls?” She asks. She lunges for the demon without waiting for an answer and yanks his victim out of his grasp. The woman collapses to the ground, and Zitao lets her fall in favor of keeping her guard up against attack. She hopes the lingering effects of the demon’s hypnosis will wear off quickly. The sooner Jane Doe gets the hell out of here, the easier Zitao’s job will be.

The demon makes a grab for Zitao before she’s even let go of the victim. Zitao dives across the pavement to direct the action away from her, somersaulting so that she can land on her feet and lunging for the demon again as soon as she finds purchase. 

From the corner of her eye she sees the woman sitting up, but not running like Zitao needs her to do before this demon slips away. She’s wobbly, probably drunk on top of hypnotized. Unhelpful.

With a conscious victim watching, Zitao can’t summon any weapons to take care of the demon. There’s no way she’ll get anywhere without doing that, and this particular demon is too smart to let Zitao lead him farther away from the crowds.

The demon sidesteps Zitao’s attack and uses her momentum to throw her into the wall. Rough concrete scrapes painfully across her shoulder through her thin shirt, but she saves thinking about the pain for later. Predictably, the demon throws a fist at her before she properly recovers, and she loses her footing and falls as she dodges it.

“Run, lady!” She shouts to the woman on the ground, hoping to get her out of the way but it’s useless; the demon is already down to the end of alley and turning out onto the busy street. When Zitao gives chase, he’s lost in the crowd.


	2. Chapter 1

Junmyeon’s internal clock is telling her that it is definitely after five o’clock, when she’s supposed to be done with her final appointment for the day, but she doesn’t allow her eyes to drift over to the clock on the wall. Children are very good at picking up on outward signs of frustration, and while an adult would most likely guess the source of her feelings, most six year olds have less experience with being stuck at work past closing time.

So Junmyeon’s smile doesn’t waver as she gently picks up the hand that has slipped out of her grasp for the tenth time. With her most consoling voice, she says, “It’s a nasty pinch, I know, but I need you to hold still for me. Just for ten more seconds! Then it’ll be over. Do you think you can do that for me?”

The owner of the hand, a six-year-old girl with a wart problem, sniffles and nods. She looks up at Junmyeon with the worst set of puppy-dog eyes in the world, but if Junmyeon received a penny for every pair of puppy eyes she has to deal with each month as a pediatrician, she’d be making as much money as her neurosurgeon sister. She’s built up quite the immunity to sad looks.

Lifting the can of liquid nitrogen again, she points it at the wart on the girl’s finger and shoots. The resulting scream is ear-splitting; something else to which Junmyeon has become accustomed. She doesn’t flinch at the sound, just keeps the girl’s tiny hand firm in her grasp and her finger on the trigger for the full ten seconds. 

“And we’re done!” Junmyeon grins at the girl as she lowers the nitrogen. “You have been such a good girl for me today.”

She goes through the motions of getting the girl a lollipop and instructing her mother on what the wound might do and what to look out for and gets them out the door without looking at the clock, knowing that seeing the time will make her impatient. It’s only after she’s left the room that she takes a look at the time and cringes—it’s almost half past five, and she’s got dinner with her sister at six o’clock. 

“We’re done,” she says to Jongin as she gets to the nursing station. “Sorry for making you wait.”

“No problem,” replies Jongin, who may or may not be a saint. A gorgeous saint. “You missed another visit from Dr. Lee, by the way.”

“Great,” Junmyeon says, not bothering to hide her sarcasm. Jongin is the only person left within earshot. 

“Have you considered just telling him you’re a lesbian?” Jongin asks.

“How am I supposed to do that? He hasn’t actually asked me out yet,” Junmyeon replies. “It’s kind of awkward to throw ‘I’m a lesbian’ into a conversation with no context.”

Despite her promises to herself during three long years in the closet while she completed her residency that she would be out at work as soon as she got a real job, Junmyeon is finding that coming out to colleagues isn’t so easy to do. It was almost impossible to stay closeted when she had a girlfriend and in the immediate recovery period after the breakup, but it’s not so difficult now that she’s single and no longer broken hearted. There’s no girlfriend to talk about or depression to explain away, and there always seems to be a reason not to tell anyone—it’s hard to bring up, or it might make people uncomfortable, or she could be fired. 

Jongin herself only knows because she’s one of Sehun’s close friends.

“Maybe just make up a girlfriend and name-drop her?” Jongin suggests. “Then say you broke up the next time someone asks.”

“Good thought,” Junmyeon tells her. It could work, if Junmyeon could work up the guts. 

For now, though, she has more pressing things on her mind. As if to call her attention to the time, her phone pings with a text from her sister that reads, _Sorry, we’re going to have company at our dinner. Look nice!_ So with another apology to Jongin, Junmyeon swaps her lab coat for her winter coat, grabs her purse, and dashes out the door. 

She’s only ten minutes late getting to the restaurant, so she checks her reflection in the mirror in the entrance and takes a moment to straighten her hair and clothes before going to find her sister’s table, wondering about the order to look nice. It’s a nice restaurant, so it’s not like she was going to show up in her dowdiest work outfit. 

There’s a man in an expensive charcoal suit sitting with her sister, and Junmyeon realizes as she approaches that she recognizes him. The director of the hospital system both she and Seungyeon work for, unless she’s mistaken, and wonders why her sister didn’t warn her more properly about this. Seungyeon and the man both stand up as soon as they see Junmyeon, so she ducks a quick bow as she approaches.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says as soon as she gets to the table. Seungyeon introduces the man as Director Park director of Haesung Hospital, and they exchange formal bows before sitting down. 

“So you’re Dr. Kim’s sister,” Director Park says as Junmyeon spreads a napkin over her lap. “I hope you don’t mind me inviting myself along to dinner, but I just couldn’t pass up the chance to meet the beautiful new pediatrician I’ve been hearing so much about.”

“Oh, well I hope she gets here soon,” Junmyeon jokes, looking around the restaurant like she’s trying to find the pediatrician in question before smiling to show that she understands the compliment. If she were to rate her forced smiles on a scale of difficulty, this one would rate higher than the one she’d given her grumpy wart patient today. 

Her mind is racing with concern. Is he going to hit on her? He’s only a little too old for Junmyeon and not unattractive, but the fact remains that he’s definitely not her type. But if he comes onto her and she rejects him, she could face retaliation at work. 

“Oh, Junmyeon,” Seungyeon groans. “Did anyone mention that the beautiful pediatrician comes with a terrible sense of humor?”

“Well, she is a pediatrician. I bet her patients love it,” Director Park says. 

Giving the man a cheesy thumbs-up with a grin, Junmyeon nods. “That’s why I went into pediatrics.”

It’s a quarter-truth at best, mostly for the sake of polite conversation, but Junmyeon finds herself hoping that Director Park loathes bad humor enough to give up on any idea he might have of dating her. Not for the first time, she envies her sister the safety provided by her ostentatious wedding ring and rich husband—nobody in polite society would dream of making open advances toward her. 

The waiter comes to get her drink order, then, and the conversation shifts to hospital news when he leaves. As drinks and appetizers begin to arrive without any additional attempts at flirting from the interloper, Junmyeon starts to think that maybe she’s misread the situation.

But halfway through the main course, Director Park asks if she’s seeing anyone. Junmyeon manages not to choke on the bite of chewy, Western-style steak she’s just put in her mouth, and it’s while she’s chewing and making awkward apologetic faces at Director Park for the poor timing that she remembers Jongin’s advice from earlier.

Junmyeon says. “I am, actually.”

“You are?” Seungyeon sounds incredulous. She turns to Director Park and ducks her head in apology, “I’m sorry, I had no idea!”

“I’m sorry,” Junmyeon says to both of them, less out of any authentic feeling of contrition than because apologies are nearly always appropriate in polite company and a fantastic way to stall for time. To Seungyeon, she says, “I hadn’t told you yet because I didn’t want to get Mother’s hopes up until I was sure it was serious, but I guess it’s been long enough now that I should have.”

Seungyeon is sending her barely-concealed skeptical looks, but Junmyeon doesn’t feel guilty at all. Her sister knows damn well that Junmyeon isn’t interested in men, so she could have saved everyone here the agony of sitting through this dinner. 

“What’s he like?” Director Park asks, and Seungyeon chokes on her asparagus. 

He’s got a devilish smirk curling on his face, because he’s rich and aware of it, and he’s clearly assuming that he’s serious competition for this guy. Junmyeon debates telling him the truth—that there’s just a disconnect between who he is and who she’d date—but that would be presumptuous, when it’s not a direct answer to his question.

“Tall,” she starts, and Seungyeon is lifting an eyebrow at her like she knows Junmyeon is just describing her ex-girlfriend. Junmyeon changes tack and grabs for the first word that comes to mind that she wouldn’t necessarily use to describe Chanyeol. “Striking. I mean, not to brag!”

She’d been so focused on avoiding gendered words or an obvious description of Chanyeol that she’d forgotten not to indirectly insult Director Park. She gives him a sheepish look.

Fortunately, he laughs it off. “Well, I hope you’ll bring him to the year-end banquet! I’d love to see who’s won the heart of our most sought-after new physician.”

“Yes,” Seungyeon agrees. “I hope you will.”

She gives Junmyeon her polite dinner table version of a shit-eating grin, familiar from years of pranking each other during boring dinners with their parents’ friends present, and Junmyeon knows the game is on. 

As soon as they’ve waved goodbye to Director Park, Seungyeon rounds on Junmyeon. “So, you decided to make it official with Sehun, then?”

“ _Unnie_ ,” Junmyeon whines, realizing that she walked right into this trap in her effort to sound like she was dating someone other than Chanyeol. “It’s not like that with Sehun, and you know it!”

“Do I?” Seungyeon asks. “She lives with you, and it’s not like you need a roommate. Pediatricians aren’t _that_ poor.”

“I don’t need a roommate, but she does,” Junmyeon sighs. She’s not poor at all, but Seungyeon has unbearably high standards. “And I like her company. That doesn’t mean we’re dating.”

The argument is so old that Seungyeon doesn’t bother to voice her disagreement, in the same way that Junmyeon climbs into her sister’s passenger seat without bothering to ask for a ride home. She has her own car, but she rarely drives to work. 

“So who is it, then?” Seungyeon asks, shit-eating grin creeping back onto her face.

“Nobody you know,” Junmyeon responds. She hates lying, but she hates giving Seungyeon any excuse to feel smug far more. 

She has to find a date for the company end-of-year party, now. It’s the end of November, which means she’s got about a month to locate a tall, striking person to go with her. That shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for a beautiful young doctor like herself.

 

Even before she gets the door to their shared apartment all the way open, Junmyeon is calling out to her _dearest, sweetest, favoritest non-biological little sister Sehunnie_ to inquire after the state of their beer supply. _Sister_ has never seemed like the right word for Sehun when she’s far closer to Junmyeon than Seungyeon has ever been, but she’s never managed to come up with a term that better describes their relationship.

And while her displays of affection toward Sehun are generally met with responses on a sliding scale from disdain to horror, the two shrieks Junmyeon hears as she toes off her shoes seem rather extreme for a few extra terms of endearment. 

The screams were also in different voices, and Junmyeon attempts to scan the mess of shoes in their entryway for a pair she doesn’t recognize, hoping for a clue to the identity of Sehun’s guest/potential attacker. It’s hopeless; there are at least five pairs she’s not sure she’s seen before, and any of them could easily belong to Sehun. 

“Unnie, help!” Sehun shouts from the living room. 

If Sehun is being murdered by her guest, she’ll be long dead by the time Junmyeon finishes her sleuthing. Giving up, Junmyeon slides into her slippers and creeps around silently into the living room, as though she has any element of surprise left.

There’s another shriek, and Junmyeon suddenly finds her arms full of a very tall woman just a bit too squishy to be Sehun. She doesn’t need to see this person’s face to know who it is, though; the subtle scent of orange blossoms and musk that hits Junmyeon’s nose where it’s mashed into not-Sehun’s collarbone is enough. It’s a perfume she’s always associated with one specific person.

Junmyeon’s captor manhandles her with a shockingly strong grip until she’s facing the living room, then hides behind her. Looking around the room, Junmyeon sees Sehun pressed as far back into the couch as she can get, with her knees up in front of her chin, staring at a cockroach on the floor by the TV.

“Unnie, kill it kill it kill iiiit!” Sehun practically shouts. “Quick, before it gets away!”

With a sigh, Junmyeon removes a slipper and darts across the room. It takes three solid swats before it’s deformed enough that she’s convinced it’s dead. Then she grabs a few tissues from beside the couch to scoop it up and toss it into the trash, an extra step she used to leave off for a few days before she and Sehun decided to live together. It turns out that what Junmyeon sees as a warning to other trespassing bugs, Sehun sees as an opportunity for the ghost of the recently deceased one to haunt their home.

It turns out that compromise is a necessary part of rooming together, even if Junmyeon thinks it’s a little unfair that it falls to her to kill all of the bugs in the apartment _and_ dispose of their corpses.

Coming back into the living room, Junmyeon flings her arms around Sehun’s guest’s waist. “Zitao! I didn’t know you were back in Korea.”

“Unnie!” Zitao hugs back with as much enthusiasm. Under the layer of squishiness, her body is solid as a rock, as always. “I’m sorry, it was a sudden decision! I just got here two weeks ago.”

Before Junmyeon can respond with how happy she is to see Sehun’s other best friend again, though, Zitao backs up suddenly. “Wait, did you wash your hands? Did you just hug me with _cockroach hands_ , Unnie?”

“What?” Junmyeon asks. “It’s not like I touched it. I used tissues.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“You two are ridiculous,” Junmyeon sighs, even as she goes to the sink to wash her hands. “Both of you.”

“Hey, at least I wasn’t climbing the couch!” Zitao snipes.

“You say that like you weren’t trying to hide behind Junmyeon-unnie,” Sehun retorts. “She’s half your size!”

As Junmyeon grabs a beer, she gets a chance to look Zitao over. She’s exactly as Junmyeon remembers from the last time they met, sometime during the first year of Junmyeon’s residency when Zitao was a college student studying abroad; all long limbs and sharp lines.

Only what hadn’t really hit Junmyeon when she was sleep-deprived and trying to split her nearly nonexistent free time in a way that would satisfy her parents, girlfriend, and friends is that Zitao is gorgeous.

She has the perfect posture of someone who spends much of her time bending her body to her will, but there’s a hint of softness clinging to her breasts and hips. The tentative demeanor Junmyeon remembers as making Tao look a bit like a shy emu with her big nose is tempered enough with confidence now that she just looks striking instead.

Settling into the armchair as Zitao and Sehun sprawl all over each other on the couch, Junmyeon has a hard time keeping her gaze on Tao’s face as she explains her return to Korea. It’s all too easy for her eyes to drift to the soft curve of a breast peeking out from the low neck of Tao’s t-shirt or her stupidly long fingers wrapping around her teacup or her equally stupidly long legs in skinny jeans tangled with Sehun’s.

It turns out that Zitao is in Korea to assist with the opening of a branch of the martial arts school she’d been working for in China in various capacities since she’d stopped competing in wushu, doing some of the managing and some of the teaching.

“I had to go into management because I suck at working with the littler kids,” she says. Junmyeon remembers that excuse from when she’d explained her decision to go to college a year after retiring from competitions.

“You do just fine with Sehunnie,” Junmyeon snarks, just to get a rise out of Sehun. 

“Hey!” Sehun yelps. If she weren’t all snuggled up with Zitao Junmyeon might’ve had to fear retaliation for that comment, but getting out of their snuggle pile looks like it would be complicated.

When Junmyeon tells Zitao that she’s glad to have her back, she means it, and not because Zitao is eye candy. It feels like it’s been forever since Junmyeon has had company without having to explain who Sehun is or why she chooses to have a roommate when she makes enough money to live alone comfortably. 

Zitao just as readily does all of the cuddling with and cooing over Sehun that has everyone convinced that Junmyeon is in love with her. Even Junmyeon has wondered more than once if Sehun and Tao aren’t actually harboring feelings for each other, but deep down she knows that it’s no different from her own relationship with Sehun. Sehun is just a clingy person. 

In all the fuss about the cockroach and Zitao’s appearance, Junmyeon manages to forget her workplace woes until Sehun asks how her dinner with her sister went. 

She groans at the reminder and recounts the whole story to Sehun and Zitao, although the latter’s eyelids are drooping; she’s probably still got jet lag, and Sehun is carding soothing fingers through her hair.

When she gets to the part about saying she has a girlfriend, Junmyeon can see Sehun’s shoulders start to inch up around her ears. They get higher when she relates Seungyeon’s comment about Sehun, clearly afraid that Junmyeon is going to drag her to the holiday party, then drop at Junmyeon’s response. 

“So now you need a tall, striking date to bring to your company party,” Sehun says. It’s not a question. She knows how Junmyeon’s relationship with her sister works.

Junmyeon nods. 

“Man or woman?”

Junmyeon bites her lip. “Woman.”

It’s more than a little scary, but she’s hoping bringing a girlfriend to the holiday party will get her out of the closet for good at work.

With a sidelong glance at the woman dozing on her shoulder, Sehun grins. “You should take Tao!”

That’s about what Junmyeon had been thinking as she related the tale, and she suspects that Sehun knows it. Zitao fits the description, and she’d be more fun to spend an evening with than a virtual stranger. She could easily feign having dated Junmyeon for a few months, given how well they know each other.

Zitao blinks awake at the mention of her name and looks around. “Huh?”

“Unnie wants you to go with her to her company’s end of the year party as her fake girlfriend,” Sehun says. 

“Oh,” Zitao looks confused. “Sure, if I’m free. When is it?”

“The twenty-ninth,” Junmyeon says. 

“Okay,” is Zitao’s response. “But you have to buy me dinner sometime to make up for it. A fancy French dinner.”

“Of course!” Grinning, Junmyeon can’t resist ruffling Zitao’s hair on the way to toss her beer can in the recycling. She doesn’t seem to have changed much. “You’re the best, Zitao.”

Zitao gives her a sleepy smile. 

“Would you like to stay here tonight?” Junmyeon asks. More than likely Sehun has already offered, but sometimes she forgets to pay attention to her guests’ needs without being directly asked for things. She’d spent her childhood largely avoiding her parents’ gatherings, so she never picked up all of the manners Junmyeon’s own parents foreed her to learn.

Meanwhile, Junmyeon has been absorbing proper hosting etiquette since she learned to speak, and she occasionally drives her guests insane with it. Jongdae once joked that it’s like Junmyeon has been fifty years old since she was a child, and Sehun will never grow up.

 

A week later, Junmyeon comes home to find Sehun sitting in a kitchen chair in a bathrobe, with a lipstick-wielding Zitao leaning over her. The table looks like someone smashed a piñata full of cosmetics over it, with bottles and tubes and cases everywhere.

“What’s going on here?” Junmyeon asks. 

“Zitao’s doing my makeup,” Sehun says. “You know, that stuff some of us like to put on to make ourselves prettier.”

Junmyeon pouts. “I can see that. But why?”

“Hunnie’s going on date!” Zitao singsongs. She puts down the lipstick she was holding and grabs a different one. Uncapping it, she holds it up to Sehun’s face and purses her lips before nodding and taking Sehun’s chin in her hand to hold her steady. 

There’s a bruise on Zitao’s wrist. It peeks out from the sleeve of her sweater when she reaches to grab something, a dusky bluish spot about the size of a dime. Junmyeon takes note of it to ask about later.

“A date?” Junmyeon says. “I didn’t know you had a date.”

As far as she knows, Sehun hasn’t gone on a date in months. This is exciting news that would normally be shared with Junmyeon, and she doesn’t know how to feel about Sehun keeping it a secret. A pang of jealousy hits her, but she quashes it instantly. She knows perfectly well that Sehun isn’t replacing her with Zitao.

Sehun waits for Zitao to finish with the lipstick and presses her lips together cautiously to even it out. Then she pouts. “That’s because you would’ve spent all week drilling me about who I’m going out with and implying that she’s actually a soul-eating demon from hell or something.”

Junmyeon frowns. “I would not!”

She would have. Soul-eating demons are something of a running joke between Junmyeon and Sehun, borrowed from a video game Sehun played years ago. Junmyeon had been acting similarly overprotective about a date at the time, and Sehun had made a comment similar to the one she just made.

Sehun raises an eyebrow. “Yes, you would. You’re worse than my mother.”

With a sigh, Junmyeon puts down her work bag and goes to grab a beer. “Okay, so I worry too much. I do hope you’re at least going to give me her name and phone number so I have something to give the police if your soul gets eaten.”

“I don’t think the police would be super helpful, at that point,” Sehun points out.

“Well, not for you. But they could find and arrest the demon so that she couldn’t continue eating the souls of hapless women.”

“Do you think a human prison is really going to stop a demon? From hell? That can eat souls?” Sehun rolls her eyes.

Zitao has been oddly silent up until this moment, but now she snorts and shakes her head. “Maybe we should worry more about more likely situations, like that you’ll end up having to go on your date in your sweatpants because we’ve got ten minutes left and you’re not dressed yet.”

With that, she hustles Sehun off to her bedroom to get dressed. Junmyeon takes the chance to change into her own sweatpants and an old, comfortable sweater in her own room, getting ready for a Friday night on the couch. Normally her bra would be coming off now, too, but she feels oddly uncomfortable at the thought of looking that sloppy in front of Zitao.

She’s just finished getting changed when she hears the doorbell ring, and she’s briefly confused before she realizes that it’s Sehun’s date. 

“I hope you know this person really well if you’re already giving her your address, Sehun!” She shouts through Sehun’s door on her way to grab the door phone and buzz the person up, planning to spend the time it takes Sehun to finish getting ready playing the scary dad.

When she opens the door, though, she blinks in surprise. The face on the little screen from the camera at the entrance to the building had looked familiar, but it’s always hard to tell with the weird camera angle. In person, she definitely recognizes the woman standing at the door with a coat draped over her arm. “Kim Minseok?”

“Junmyeon?” Minseok looks as shocked to see Junmyeon as Junmyeon is to see her. 

“Are you Sehun’s date?” Junmyeon asks, just to check. The nice blazer and expensive jeans she’s wearing look like date gear, anyway. 

Minseok confirms that she is Sehun’s date, and Junmyeon invites her inside to wait, guiding her cautiously to the living room so that Sehun won’t be humiliated by her date seeing the explosion of makeup on the kitchen table. 

A polite way to ask after Minseok’s sexual orientation eludes her—she’d thought Minseok was straight—so she asks how Minseok’s job is going instead. She’s some kind of engineer at the biotech company Jongdae works for, so Junmyeon is half expecting a dead-end answer about trade secrets. 

It turns out that they’ve just patented a big breakthrough in cold chain technology that could be great for getting medications to countries with low resources, though, so they’re chatting about the frustrations of vaccines that need to be kept at specific temperatures when Sehun finally comes out. 

“Unnie! I’m sorry for making you wait,” Sehun says shyly as she walks into the room. 

Junmyeon’s back is to the hallway, so she gets to see the look of surprise on Minseok’s face as she sees Sehun. Turning around, she sees that Sehun is dressed adorably in a soft, persimmon-colored sweater and a skirt that hits about mid-thigh over tights. Her hair falls in soft curls around her shoulders. 

Unfortunately, she’s also wearing the terrifying stony expression she gets when she’s nervous. Junmyeon is wondering if she should get Minseok’s number from Jongdae later for some damage control when Minseok says, “Sehunnie, you look amazing!” 

A bashful little smile works its way onto Sehun’s lips, then, and Junmyeon thinks she’s going to be on Team Minseok as Minseok gets up to coo over her properly. 

 

Once Sehun has left, Junmyeon and Zitao look at each other. 

“You seem calmer,” Zitao notes.

“I know Minseok,” Junmyeon says. “She seems put together, and she knows I know enough about her to give the police lots of details if she does anything bad.”

Zitao snorts. “Sehun is right. You’re overprotective.”

With a rueful smile, Junmyeon agrees. “I know, but it’s a scary world. And Sehun can be a little clueless.”

“I know,” Zitao says. Junmyeon sort of doubts that, but she holds her tongue. 

“You did a great job with her makeup, by the way,” Junmyeon says, to move the conversation away from her own flaws. Zitao preens. 

“Thank you, Unnie!”

There’s something about the way that Zitao says _unnie_ that makes Junmyeon feel like someone’s just grabbed her heart and squeezed it. She’s not sure why.

She can feel herself starting to blush, so she tries to cover it up with a laugh. “Do you remember when you called me noona?”

That was a solid decade ago, now, back when Zitao was an exchange student in high school with Sehun and Junmyeon was in college. She’d heard Sehun calling Junmyeon ‘noona’ and hadn’t known that being a girl meant she should use ‘unnie’ instead. Junmyeon had spent a few seconds wondering if Zitao was actually a boy—she _was_ awfully tall for a girl—before Sehun had corrected her. 

These days she’s ‘unnie’ to both of them, of course, but Sehun hadn’t brought that up until after Zitao returned to China. 

“Don’t pick on me, Unnie,” Zitao pouts. It’s such a cute sight that Junmyeon just has to ruffle her hair.

“So, what are your Friday night plans now that Sehun is off on her date?” Junmyeon asks.

Given that Zitao is wearing a loose, long-sleeved T-shirt and relatively plain jeans (for Zitao, anyway), Junmyeon assumes that the answer is nothing. When her assumption turns out to be correct, Junmyeon invites her to stick around for some movies and wine. 

They order pizza for delivery, and Zitao starts rifling through Junmyeon and Sehun’s movie collection while Junmyeon pours the wine. 

“Sehun told me you broke up with Chanyeol?” Zitao asks, out of nowhere.

“Yes, years ago,” Junmyeon responds. “While I was still a resident.”

“I’m sorry,” Zitao says. “You really seemed to like her.”

“I did, but that was a long time ago.”

It’s true. She’d loved Chanyeol. It’s been over two years since they decided to call it quits, though, and sometimes she’s amazed at just how much it doesn’t bother her anymore. 

Zitao says nothing more about it, just waves _Star Wars_ at her. “Marathon?”

_A New Hope_ goes in first at Junmyeon’s insistence. They end up on the couch, with Zitao draping her arm over Junmyeon’s shoulders, and some traitorous part of Junmyeon’s mind is telling her how easy it would be to stretch up and kiss that curly little mouth, how soft and warm Zitao’s body would feel against hers if she did.

Junmyeon doesn’t know what to do about this. She’s hardly had these thoughts at all since Chanyeol, to the point that she’s wondered if maybe she’s broken, or if maybe soulmates exist and Chanyeol was hers. While she’s happy for the confirmation that those thoughts were ridiculous, she feels a little bit gross for thinking these things about someone who’s snuggling her in a platonic manner.

As such, she’s very relieved when the pizza arrives. She takes the opportunity to put some distance between herself and Zitao, and Zitao is too busy eating and watching the movie to notice for quite a while. 

They’re halfway through the food when Zitao’s phone chimes. She looks at it for a moment, and her eyebrows knit together in confusion. The wine must be starting to kick in, because Junmyeon wants to stick her thumb between them and smooth out the crease.

Finally, Zitao shakes her head and thrusts the phone at Junmyeon. “I can’t read this. What does it say?”

The sender of the text is identified as Hun-ah~<3, and the text itself is such a jumbled mess that Junmyeon has a hard time reading it. Eventually, she works out, “Help she’s ridiculous and adorable and hot and I keep blushing and don’t know what to say.”

She relays this to Zitao, who snorts and takes back the phone. “How does she live?”

Snorting, Junmyeon can’t resist leaning into Zitao to read her response as she types it. “It’s OK you’re cute when you’re flustered. Ask her how she knows Junmyeon or something.”

Nodding her approval, Junmyeon is about to go back to watching the movie when she sees a flash of the bruise on Zitao’s wrist again as she puts her phone back on the coffee table. Junmyeon catches her arm and pulls it up to examine it. 

It’s a medium-sized bruise, one that could’ve been made by an arm or a railing. It’s still a deep, fresh purple.

“Is this from work?” Junmyeon asks.

“Huh?” Zitao says, then frowns. “Oh, um, yeah.”

Junmyeon tuts and tells her to be careful, and Zitao laughs.

“Unnie, I teach martial arts! Bruises are going to happen.”

Defeated, Junmyeon lets go of Zitao’s arm. Zitao snorts.

“You’re not going to make it better, seongsaengnim?”

“It’s seonsaengnim,” Junmyeon corrects. Grabbing Zitao’s arm again, she ducks down and plants a kiss on the purple skin.

It was supposed to be a joke, but Junmyeon regrets it instantly as a traitorous spark of arousal trips through her. Zitao’s skin is smooth under her lips, and the orange blossom perfume is strongest at her wrist. The difference in their skin tones makes for a pretty contrast, too. Junmyeon is hit with the urge to trail kisses up her arm. 

Sitting up, Junmyeon hopes her blush isn’t as noticeable as the burning feeling in her face tells her it probably is. She tries to grin cheekily at Zitao, but it feels strange. Soldiering on, she says, “Better?”

Zitao is staring at her with wide eyes. “What?”

“See? You’ve already forgotten about the bruise,” Junmyeon says. She throws in a cheesy wink for effect.

“Unnie!” Zitao whines and shoves at Junmyeon’s shoulders, and Junmyeon doubles over laughing.

It’s not until they’re halfway through _Return of the Jedi_ that Sehun finally comes home; Junmyeon is proud of herself for not worrying obsessively, although she probably has the comfort of Tao’s shoulder and several glasses of wine to thank for that.

The sound of the door opening rouses her from her semi-lucid state, but not really enough to deal with an excited Sehun gushing about how Minseok is the most perfect woman on the face of the planet. Thankfully, Zitao isn’t quite as sleepy as Junmyeon, and she bounds over eagerly to get all the details.

From what Junmyeon manages to catch, their date was just supposed to be dinner, but Sehun had failed to get past her nerves by the time the waiter cleared away the dessert plates. She’d been feeling like a failure, expecting her date to end once again with the other party mistaking her nerves for a lack of interest, but instead Minseok had asked if Sehun liked arcade games. 

Several hours of kicking each other’s asses at every game in the arcade later, Sehun is ready to go shopping for wedding dresses. 

Junmyeon is _definitely_ Team Minseok.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I <3 comments! You can also HMU there or at [ask.fm](https://ask.fm/oyakodon) if something doesn't make sense.


	3. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two warnings: minor (non-)character death of the sort you'd see in a crime show, very mild biphobia

_Striking_ isn’t quite the right word for Zitao when she’s dressed for an evening holiday party; _stunning_ would be more accurate. She knows it, too, if the way she preens while Junmyeon tries to scrape her jaw off the ground is any indication. 

“Ready to go, Unnie?” She asks. Sehun is smirking at Junmyeon over Zitao’s shoulder as she slips into strappy black sandals that go with the dress she’s wearing. The dress itself is slinky and black and barely covers the important bits of Zitao’s chest, with off-the-shoulder straps that do more to accentuate her shoulders than hold up the rest of the dress. The curly mass of hair pinned to the back of her head looks professionally done, and the jewelry she’s wearing looks like it must have cost at least a month’s rent for a perfectly nice apartment.

Unfortunately, the high heels of her sandals make the height difference between them that much worse, as Junmyeon had kept to her own traditional limit of two inches. This means that Zitao’s breasts are much closer to eye level for Junmyeon than her face, which will make acting like a polite adult all evening that much more difficult. At least people will be convinced that she’s attracted to Zitao, she thinks.

They cross paths with Minseok in the corridor, on her way to pick up Sehun for her own date, and Minseok’s eyebrows shoot up when she sees them. 

“Junmyeon, I didn’t know you were seeing someone!” Minseok’s eyes trace the arm that Junmyeon has unthinkingly placed around Zitao’s waist. 

Junmyeon blanches and nearly drops her arm as she fumbles over what to say, but Zitao comes to the rescue with a tidy bow, protecting her bust with her hand, “I’m Zitao. We sort of met the other night when you came to pick up Sehun, but you were too busy looking at Sehun to notice me.”

Minseok flushes and stammers, and Zitao smiles innocently back. “Not that anyone could blame you.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you properly,” Minseok says with a sheepish smile. “Sehun talks about you a lot. I’m sorry if I was rude before.”

When they finally slip into the car and close the doors, Junmyeon allows herself to slump against the steering wheel for a moment. “Great, now Minseok thinks we’re dating.” 

Zitao’s smile is the same innocent one she’d given Minseok, all curled up eyes and cuteness. “I didn’t say we were.”

“Yes, but neither of us denied it,” Junmyeon says. “That’s as good as lying.”

“We can clear it up later,” Zitao says, like there’s going to be some easy way to talk their way around having lied unnecessarily to Sehun’s girlfriend (not that she’d use the label in front of Sehun, but they’ve been on at least six dates in the past three weeks, so Junmyeon thinks it’s fair to refer to them as a couple). “I bet Sehun will tell her the truth, though.”

It’s a chilly night, and all Zitao has brought to keep herself warm is a thin wrap. Junmyeon switches on the seat warmers and blasts the heat in the car, sad that her own jacket is too small to offer to Zitao; she’d found an avant garde dress with a tuxedo-inspired blazer to get around her distaste for the excessive femininity of women’s formal clothes without having to wear a boxy suit. The blazer is nicely tailored and hits Junmyeon’s wrists where it’s supposed to, but on Zitao the same sleeves would hardly be more than elbow length.

She keeps herself busy with inane thoughts like that until they’ve arrived at the venue, and the valet stares at her as she helps Zitao out of the passenger seat. Then she claps a hand to her mouth and swallows down the urge to vomit.

“Are you okay?” Zitao asks, sounding alarmed. 

Junmyeon heaves a breath in with her diaphragm, pauses, forces it out, and repeats the action twice more until the urge to vomit is gone. Keeping it down as she looks at Zitao and tries to smile reassuringly is nigh impossible, because looking at Zitao reminds her that she’s coming out to the entire company tonight.

And it will be the entire company, because there’s no way that anyone won’t notice Zitao. When she’d planned this, she’d imagined working her way through the party quietly, with a woman at her side, and only having to field questions from the more inquisitive of her colleagues, who would in turn pass the news around as water cooler gossip and essentially do the bulk of the coming out work for her. 

That was a terrifying enough proposition for Junmyeon, really, but now she’s thinking bringing Zitao was a mistake. Everyone will notice the tall, model-like woman they’ve never seen before and wonder who she’s here with, and that, in turn, will lead to a lot of attention on Junmyeon.

It’s too late to back out, though, because here’s Dr. Lee approaching her already. “Good evening, Dr. Kim. Don’t tell me you’re here without a date?”

Pasting on a gracious smile, Junmyeon gestures at Zitao. “It’s good to see you, Dr. Lee. Zitao is actually my date.”

“Oh, did you bring a friend because you’re single?” Dr. Lee asks, and Junmyeon stares at him for a moment in shock, less because of the misinterpretation than because his choice of words was unnecessarily rude. She thinks she hears Zitao stifling a laugh behind her.

“No, I mean she’s my date-date. As in my girlfriend,” Junmyeon says. That’s still probably not enough for Dr. Lee, if he missed the point the first time, but she can’t say more without being rude herself. 

“We’ve been seeing each other for a few months,” Zitao chips in cheerfully, like an excited new girlfriend, twining her hand helpfully around Junmyeon’s own.

“Oh,” Dr. Lee says. “Ohh.”

And then he fumbles through some vague excuse about his own date and drinks and wanders away.

“Is the whole evening going to be like that?” Zitao mutters through her smile to Junmyeon, who cringes.

“It might,” she mutters back. “We have some really dense doctors. I think they got through medical school by neglecting their social lives.”

There’s nothing to do but square their shoulders and go inside, where at least a hundred people are already milling about. Junmyeon spots Seungyeon almost immediately and guides Zitao over to greet her. The look of shock on Seungyeon’s face as she spots Zitao, then traces her arm to where her hand is wrapped around Junmyeon’s might actually be worth any consequences she runs into as a result of her choice of date for the evening.

“Tall and striking was right,” Seungyeon says, once introductions are out of the way. “How on earth do you convince these people to date you, Junmyeon?”

Then Director Park is jumping in to greet them, and asking if Zitao was indeed the person she’d mentioned at dinner a month ago. When she says yes, he leans in to say that he hopes she’s aware that the hospital system doesn’t discriminate based on sexual orientation and tells her to let him know if she has any trouble with other staff.

Junmyeon thanks him, surprised and relieved, though she doesn’t take his offer seriously. 

They make it through at least fifteen more obligatory greetings, ten of which include direct discussion of the nature of her relationship with Zitao, before they make it to the table Jongin has staked out with Taemin, her physical therapist boyfriend. For all she draws more attention than Junmyeon can handle, Zitao has handled the situation with more grace than anyone else Junmyeon knows could have managed. Perhaps it’s something about having all of those muscles, but Zitao’s shoulders never droop, nor does she make any attempt to shy away.

Or maybe she’s actually enjoying it, because everyone seems to comment on how beautiful she is. She has always loved praise. 

Jongin gets up from her seat as they approach and waves shyly at Zitao like she knows her from somewhere. There’s a moment during which Zitao just stares at Jongin in apparent confusion, but then Zitao is shrieking and pulling her into a giant hug while Junmyeon and Taemin take on the task of being confused. 

Eventually it hits Junmyeon that Zitao must have met Jongin via Sehun at some point during college. She occasionally forgets that Jongin and Sehun were friends long before Junmyeon and Jongin landed jobs at the same clinic, even though they’ve only been working together for a year.

After brief introductions for Taemin and Zitao, they settle gratefully into the chairs Jongin has saved. Dr. Lee is across the table, but it’s fortunately a rather large table, seating about ten people, and the large floral centerpiece almost completely obscures him from view.

“She’s as cute as I remember her being,” Jongin whispers in Junmyeon’s ear once they’re seated. “Are you sure you don’t want to date her?”

Junmyeon lets her blush answer that question.

 

She’d expected to be relieved when the whole dinner was over, but Junmyeon is still tense when they’re halfway home, having made their excuses quickly after the speeches and awards ended. Tonight was scary, certainly, but she won’t know what people really think until she has to deal with them one on one.

The only thing that’s kept her sane through the night is Zitao, by virtue of being both distractingly beautiful and far too keyed into other people’s emotions. Every time Junmyeon started to look too panicked, Zitao would notice and tense up visibly, which in turn focused Junmyeon’s attention on her. 

Not that it’s any comfort to realize that she thinks Sehun’s best friend is the cutest girl in the world, but worrying about how to deal with her attraction distracted her from the other worries plaguing her, like whether she’s just thrown her career away for the sake of getting men to stop hitting on her at work.

Now she’s steadfastly avoiding looking at Zitao, afraid of being caught in the act, even though she knows Zitao caught her once or twice during the awards. The confined space of the car makes it far more awkward.

“It’s okay to look, Unnie.” Zitao says, like she’s reading Junmyeon’s mind. “I know you have been.”

Junmyeon sighs and _does_ look as she pulls up to a red light, but not in the manner Zitao is implying. “I know, Taozi, but looking leads to…”

“To what, touching?” Tao asks when she trails off. “You can do that too, you know. I’m not an expensive vase in a store.”

Junmyeon snorts, but she still hesitates. The issue isn’t a question of Zitao’s interest—she knows how to ask about things like that. “I’m worried because we’re both so close to Sehun, and I live with her. If things don’t work out, it’ll be really awkward for all of us.”

“Oh,” Zitao says. “Well, if we don’t do anything, she’ll be depressed. She’s really determined to set us up, you know.”

How very Sehun. Junmyeon wants to groan, but she doesn’t. “Sehun has been trying to set me up with every single queer woman she’s come across for the past year, except the ones she wants for herself.”

“She’s worried about you,” Zitao says. “Anyway, why borrow trouble? Maybe we’ll be perfect together.”

_Or maybe Sehun will move in with Minseok long before we manage to screw up,_ Junmyeon thinks. She keeps quiet until they’ve pulled into the visitor parking spot outside Zitao’s apartment building, weighing the pros and cons.

Zitao turns to the door handle to hide the frown she thinks Junmyeon hasn’t seen, but Junmyeon grabs her nearer arm to stop her from getting out of the car. Looking confused, Zitao turns back to her. 

“Can I kiss you, Taozi?” Junmyeon asks. 

A little kitten smile spreads quickly on Zitao’s face, like ripples spreading from a raindrop into a pool. “Yes, please.”

The center console of the car gets in the way, and Junmyeon has to do a ridiculous amount of straining to reach Zitao’s mouth. It’s worth it, though, to feel Zitao’s lips against hers. Zitao makes a happy noise and opens her mouth when Junmyeon does. Her hands trail over Junmyeon’s shoulders and down her sides, and Junmyeon only pulls back when they flit back up to her breasts.

“Isn’t that moving too fast, Zitao?” Junmyeon says.

“Fast?” Zitao is flushed and maybe a little breathless. “I’ve had a crush on you for years, Unnie. That makes this slow.”

The information about Zitao’s crush is news to Junmyeon. It might worry her if Zitao looked serious, but Zitao can’t stop her eyes from curling up with a smile even as she tries to pout at Junmyeon. She makes to kiss Junmyeon again, but Junmyeon only lets her get away with a quick peck before gently placing hands on her shoulders and pushing her away.

“ _Unnie_ ,” Zitao whines. Her pout is like a weapon in its cuteness, but Junmyeon holds firm.

“You might have been thinking about this for a while, but I haven’t,” she says. “I need time to process everything.”

A voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Baekhyun’s says, _You’d_ like _to be processing the way her skin tastes._ She ignores it. She also ignores how much she’d like to get her hand between Zitao’s legs and watch her fall apart. There will be time for that later.

It takes effort to walk Zitao to her front door and then leave her there with just one last, chaste kiss, but Junmyeon does.

 

When Sehun finally rolls out of bed in what is technically still the morning—Junmyeon isn’t sure when she even got home last night—she levels Junmyeon with an exasperated look.

“I cannot believe that Zitao propositioned you last night, and you turned her down.”

Junmyeon glances heavenward for support. “I didn’t turn her down. I just said I’d like to take things slower than she was taking them.”

“But why?” Sehun says. “You haven’t been laid in forever, and Zitao is a perfectly nice girl. Who, I should note, has been pining after you _forever_ , and _I_ am the one who has had to listen to it!”

“Yes, and there’s more to relationships than sex,” Junmyeon says. “I didn’t even know she was interested in me until yesterday! And I’m afraid she’ll be hurt that I’m not as invested as she is, if she’s had feelings for that long.”

Grimacing, Sehun pours herself a cup of coffee from the pot, tastes it, grimaces again, and tosses it. The warmer has long since timed out and turned itself off, so it must be cold. She takes out the filter and replaces it with a new one, into which she dumps a generous heap of coffee, and then she fills it with enough water for at least eight cups. 

“Why can’t we just get a Keurig?” She grumbles. “And do you seriously think she’ll be any less hurt if you reject her completely? She was really excited about getting a chance to go out with you, even as your fake girlfriend.”

“Keurigs are wasteful and don’t make good coffee,” Junmyeon says. Sehun doesn’t even like coffee; she uses it as a vehicle for cream and sugar. “And who says I’m rejecting her completely? I just want to take things slow, so I’ll have time to adjust.”

“Is this like how you’ve taken like three years to adjust to your breakup with Chanyeol? Because I do not approve of you making my best friend wait three years for sex while you work on your weird relationship issues.”

“It won’t be three years,” Junmyeon says. It won’t even be three weeks, if the dreams she had last night are any indication. Or the number of orgasms she pulled off before she went to sleep, for that matter. She can’t even sort out which things in her head are dreams and which are fantasies she came up with while masturbating. 

Sehun relents, finally. She stays standing in front of the coffee maker as coffee slowly drips into the pot and mutters about how a Keurig would’ve been done by now.

“How’s Minseok?” Junmyeon asks. 

Sehun grimaces again, and Junmyeon has to hold back from telling her that her face will stick that way if she keeps doing it. “Don’t ask.”

Oh. Junmyeon’s mind instantly fills with awful scenarios involving Minseok and Sehun, most of which she knows are ridiculous (although notably not as ridiculous as soul-eating demons). She considers pushing for more information, but it would only make Sehun angry. “Just tell me if I need to go beat her up?”

“No,” Sehun says. “She didn’t do anything wrong, and anyway you couldn’t beat her up if you tried. She’s way tougher than you. You’d have to get Zitao to do it.”

“Zitao can’t even kill a cockroach,” Junmyeon points out. Before she can figure out what to say next, she’s interrupted by her phone buzzing on the table. The screen cheerfully declares that it’s her mother calling, so she scoops the phone up and answers. Keeping her mother waiting is rarely worth it.

Her mother’s insistence upon things like etiquette and niceties means that Junmyeon has to survive a good ten minutes of idle talk about their health and inconsequential things like the weather before they get to the point of the conversation, giving her plenty of time to figure it out on her own and panic before they get there.

Sure enough, when she’s finally finished telling Junmyeon about her father’s attempts at getting enough exercise (his doctor told him that golf didn’t really count), there’s a brief pause, and then she strikes.

“By the way,” she says, like this isn’t the entire reason she called, “I was talking to Seungyeon this morning, and she said something about you bringing a girlfriend to the year-end dinner?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry I haven’t mentioned her yet. It’s still new,” Junmyeon hedges.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” her mother says. “I’m just glad to hear you’re seeing someone again. Might she be able to come to dinner in a couple weeks? I’m trying to get everyone together.”

“I can ask, but she might be a little nervous. She’s just moved back to Korea after a long absence, and she’s embarrassed about her speech,” Junmyeon says. “I think she’s afraid to meet you because she’s noticed how properly I speak, and she doesn’t always know what’s proper yet…”

Sehun has obtained her coffee and dumped in mountains of cream and sugar, and now she’s leaning against the counter to stare at Junmyeon over it, grinning. It’s not helping Junmyeon in her mission to make up excuses on the fly. 

On the other end of the line, her mother persists. “Oh, I’m sure she’ll be fine. Is she Korean?”

“No, Chinese,” Junmyeon says, knowing her mother is probably hoping that she’s found a girl who’s been abroad studying at a prestigious university. She’ll be a bit disappointed by Zitao, most likely.

“I see,” her mother says. “Well, we’re doing dinner the Saturday after next, if that works for you? You can bring her along.”

Junmyeon agrees and gets ready to hang up, but her mother pauses. “Oh, and Junmyeon?”

“Yes?”

“I hope everything goes okay at work. I know how much it bothered you to keep things secret.”

The words are tentative and awkward, but they’re there. It’s a great improvement over the discomfort and silence that had met Junmyeon when she’d told her family a few years ago, tired of coming up with excuses not to visit her parents during her residency when she was really just trying to spend time with a girlfriend they didn’t know about. There’s a little sting in Junmyeon’s eyes and nose that tells her she’s about to cry, but she manages not to choke up before she says thank you and ends the call. 

One deep breath in shoves the tears back where they came from, and then Junmyeon opens her eyes to see Sehun laughing at her.

“Okay, I really hope you’re not going to force her to meet your parents before you put out.”

It’s Junmyeon’s turn to grimace, this time. She puts her face in her hands and groans for added effect. She doesn’t even know how to broach this topic with Zitao. ‘Hi, I know we’re not even officially dating yet, but would you like to meet my parents?’

Slender arms slip around her shoulders from behind, and she looks up in surprise. 

“I’m really happy that they’re being so accepting this time, though,” Sehun says, suddenly serious.

“Thank you,” Junmyeon says, touching Sehun’s arm. “I’m not sure she won’t change her mind when she finds out Tao isn’t a genius who’s just moved to Korea to do biomedical research fresh off an Ivy League PhD, though.”

Sehun snorts and gives her shoulders a squeeze. “Nah, Tao can charm the pants off of anyone.”

 

On Thursday, Zitao walks into the French restaurant for the date she’d demanded in return for pretending to be Junmyeon’s girlfriend with puffy eyelids and pale skin. She’s wearing tons of makeup in what Junmyeon assumes is an attempt to hide the dark circles under her eyes, but it’s not working.

“I’m sorry I had to cancel Tuesday,” is the first thing she says, but Junmyeon couldn’t possibly be irritated about the sudden need to reschedule when Zitao looks so exhausted. 

“It’s okay. I’m just glad they had a time slot open up for tonight, instead,” Junmyeon says. “Is everything okay?”

Zitao’s smile is wan. “Yes, I just…some things happened at work that I had to take care of.”

It’s weirdly closed off for Zitao, who generally spills every detail of a complaint without any prompting, even sometimes when she has to come up with verbal workarounds to make up for gaps in her Korean vocabulary. 

The waiter comes by for their drink orders, then, but Junmyeon sticks to the topic when he’s left.

“Do you want to talk about it?” She asks.

Shaking her head, Zitao says, “No, we should talk about something more cheerful. How was your day?”

Junmyeon winces, “Not particularly cheerful. Somehow I got double-booked for the morning, so I was behind on appointments all day.”

She still doesn’t know why or how it happened. It’s not exactly easy to make that kind of mistake in the clinic’s scheduling system, which has red blocks on taken appointments and pops up eighty error messages if you so much as click on a red block. Junmyeon has been working with the nurse who made the mistake for a year with no problem, though, so she’s hoping it’s just a glitch.

“Were your patients upset?” Zitao asks, and Junmyeon laughs.

“More than usual, yes,” she says. “Kids aren’t usually happy to be at the doctor’s office. Dragging it out makes it worse.”

Zitao’s smile is a little less wan, this time, with a little more curl to her eyes involved. “I guess you’re right. I certainly never enjoyed it.”

“Did you put up a fuss?” Junmyeon asks. She suspects that Zitao wouldn’t have, as soon as she was old enough to pick up on what her parents wanted. Zitao has always been eager to please, although Junmyeon often wonders whether that’s a reaction to the language barrier. Maybe she’s different at home, where she’s comfortable.

But Zitao shakes her head. “I wanted to make my mom happy, so I’d grin and bear it. The pain from needles never bothered me much after I started martial arts, anyway.”

“When was that?” Junmyeon asks. Somehow, she’s never heard the story of Zitao’s introduction to martial arts, and she’s always been curious.

By the time she was a junior in high school, Zitao was enough of a bigtime wushu competitor that she’d kicked off a minor scandal by choosing to take a break to study abroad for a year. There’d been rumors that she was hiding a pregnancy or was secretly in rehab for a drug addiction. According to Sehun, she’d cried a lot after reading those comments.

“When I was five,” Zitao says. She pauses to yawn behind her hand, then continues, “My dad says I was too mischievous as a child, so he put me in martial arts classes to wear me out and keep me out of trouble.”

Junmyeon smiles at the thought of an energetic young Zitao and wonders if she could get Zitao’s mother to scan over some baby pictures. This lunar new year is probably too soon for her to get herself invited back to Zitao’s family home, but maybe next year she can, if Zitao is out to her parents.

 

She really _shouldn’t_ be making out with Zitao when she still hasn’t managed to ask whether she’s out to her family—and it hit her more and more during dinner that she doesn’t know if she can handle jumping into someone else’s closet like that—but that’s what she finds herself doing up against the inside of Zitao’s door after dinner. 

She’d only meant to walk Zitao to her door and then leave, but then Zitao was opening it and tugging at her hand with pleading eyes. So she’d slipped inside and pressed Zitao to the other side of it and kissed her.

Zitao’s arms drape over her shoulders, and she has to lean down to meet Junmyeon’s mouth even with Junmyeon on tiptoes, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Junmyeon traces her mouth down over Zitao’s jaw, and then onto her throat, where that orange blossom perfume is really strong. Even as she’s pressing her knee between Zitao’s legs and tugging her closer by the hips she thinks they’re moving too fast, but then Zitao mewls. Junmyeon rocks forward to hear the sound again and nibbles on Zitao’s collarbone.

She thinks Zitao is about to fall asleep for a moment after they’ve managed to rid themselves of clothes and fall into bed, but Zitao pouts when she offers to stop, so Junmyeon just slips her fingers up the insides of Zitao’s thighs and resolves to make it quick. 

“There’ll be other chances,” Junmyeon says again when, five minutes later, Zitao seems to be struggling to keep her eyes open. “Won’t you have a hard time coming when you’re this sleepy?”

“You can never know for sure that there’ll be other chances,” Zitao says. Then she moans and tenses when Junmyeon rocks the fingers she’s got inside Zitao and pushes her thumb carefully closer to Zitao’s clit. “Besides, that feels really, really good, Unnie.”

“Does it?” Junmyeon asks. She does it again, and Zitao makes a cute little whine.

“Unnie,” she says. Then again, when Junmyeon moves faster, and again, and it’s rapidly becoming Junmyeon’s favorite word in the history of language. Her own body is desperately demanding contact, now, but her current position over Zitao doesn’t give her anything to rub up against. If she moves, she might lose the angle that’s currently working so well. 

Zitao comes with a jumbled mix of ‘unnie’s and ‘please’s, and Junmyeon kisses her gently as she comes down, easing herself down to lie next to her on the sheets when the aftershocks stop. She’s prepared to wait until Zitao is safely asleep before getting herself off, lest Zitao notice and feel pressured into helping when she clearly needs sleep, but she’s surprised when Zitao’s eyes flick back open.

Long fingers brush against her thighs. Junmyeon covers them with one of her own hands to interrupt their trajectory. “You don’t need to do that. Go to sleep.”

“Unnie,” Zitao says. That damn word again. “Please let me. I want to.”

It won’t take Junmyeon long at this rate, anyway, so she lets go of Zitao’s hand. “As long as you keep calling me that.”

“What?” Zitao says, tracing her fingers lightly along the seam of Junmyeon’s thigh. She presses one up against Junmyeon’s outer labia, down by her entrance and says, with deviously narrowed eyes, “Unnie?”

It’s right by Junmyeon’s ear. Junmyeon gasps. “Yes, that.”

But then she blocks Zitao from saying it any more by engaging her mouth with a million kisses as Zitao works her up with long, sturdy fingers until she comes. 

“You’re wonderful, Taozi,” Junmyeon says afterward, as she makes a half-hearted attempt at cleaning them up while Zitao fights to keep her eyes open. Zitao smiles, maybe even blushes, and Junmyeon tells her to go to sleep.

 

Junmyeon goes out for drinks with Jongdae the next evening, and she’s mildly surprised when Jongdae almost immediately starts grilling her about her “girlfriend.” Minseok has never struck her as the gossiping type, but she doesn’t know how else Jongdae would know.

“Did you hear about that from Minseok?” She asks.

“She was just trying to get people together for drinks. I don’t think she realized that I didn’t know you had a girlfriend. Which I didn’t,” Jongdae glares. “So spill.”

Shaking her head, Junmyeon stirs her white Russian and grins. The story is juicy and ridiculous, so she knows Jongdae will forgive her as soon as it gets good.

“Do you remember Sehun’s friend Zitao? I think you met her once or twice.”

Jongdae purses her lips, eyebrows tipping even higher than their normal upward tilt as she considers. “The tall Chinese girl? With the muscles?”

Eyes widening, she slams her hands down onto the table, making their dishes rattle. “No. Her? How did you manage that? And how have you _not been gloating to me about it_?”

And so Junmyeon spills the whole story, starting with the dinner with her sister, and Jongdae laughs incredulously at it all. “You asked Zitao on a fake date? And she agreed? You realize she’s probably swimming in offers for real dates?”

Leaving out the sex is pointless, since Jongdae is bound to ask, so Junmyeon tells the story right up to the end, glossing over the explicit bits.

At the end, Jongdae is thoughtful for a moment. “You know you could have told me about the plan to come out at work, right? That’s scary stuff.”

“I know,” Junmyeon says. “To be honest, I couldn’t even think about it without wanting to throw up. Talking about it would have made it worse.”

After reassuring Jongdae that things have been okay at work since the party (they haven’t, but she doesn’t want people to worry), Junmyeon finally sees the chance to get at what she’s been wanting to ask for a while.

“So, Minseok,” she says.

“Minseok?” Jongdae looks confused for a moment at the sudden change in subject, but then she grins. “Minseok gets this goofy little grin on her face every time she gets a text from Sehun at work.”

Junmyeon smiles, but she can’t shake her worries about Sehun’s grim response to her question about the relationship the week before. “Is she trustworthy? Or do I need to threaten her with bodily harm?”

Jongdae purses her lips. “To be honest, she doesn’t talk about her relationships much. I don’t think I’ve heard her mention a romantic interest in years. I think she really likes Sehun, though, and I don’t have any reason to think she’s a less-than-stellar person.”

That’ll have to do, Junmyeon thinks. She’ll just have to trust that Minseok is not a soul-eating demon. After all, human relationships all rely on a certain amount of trust in order to work. For all Junmyeon knows, Zitao could be a soul-eating demon, too. 

Junmyeon nearly falls over laughing at the thought of Zitao being a demon, and then she has to explain the whole thing to Jongdae, starting with her joke about Minseok. She’s drunk enough that she’s pretty sure it comes out muddled, but Jongdae just pats her on the back. From the force of the thumps she surmises that Jongdae is also rather drunk.

“I’m glad to hear that you’ve been working on your trust issues,” Jongdae says. “But at the same time, I’m horrified to learn that you suspect people of being demons.”

Junmyeon giggles and gives Jongdae a very drunk grin. “Maybe you’re a demon!”

They make their wobbly way home a while later, after Jongdae has made her usual plea to spend the night at Junmyeon’s place because it’s “closer.” The bar is about halfway between their apartments, but Junmyeon gave up arguing years ago. She’s pretty sure that Jongdae is just afraid to walk alone at night.

“But really, Junmyeonnie,” Jongdae slurs as they pass the OK Cleaners, all shuttered up for the night. She jabs at Junmyeon’s shoulder with a finger, more forcefully than she probably intended, and Junmyeon has to catch herself with a hand against the bricks of the old building to keep from falling. “You need to trust Sehun’s judgment. It can’t be that bad.”

Junmyeon is about to retort with the tale of Sehun’s last serious relationship when she spots a shoe sitting all by its lonesome on the sidewalk by the wall. It’s shiny and has a frighteningly high heel, the kind that requires a platform under the toe to be feasible. She moves closer, trying to figure out if it looks like it’s been there for a while, and that’s when she notices a foot.

It’s sticking out of the alley next to OK Cleaners. Junmyeon props herself against the wall and leans to look into the alley, where there’s a young woman wearing a short, tight dress lying motionless on the ground. 

“Jongdae,” Junmyeon says. “Wait.”

Stepping forward, she crouches down carefully and gently shakes the woman’s shoulder, then asks if she’s okay. She picks up the woman’s wrist to check for a pulse when she doesn’t stir, hoping it’s just someone who had a little too much to drink. 

Her pulse fades out just as Junmyeon finds it.

“Do I need to call 119?” Jongdae asks.

“Yes,” Junmyeon says. “Pulse just stopped.”

She kneels and centers her hands on the woman’s chest as Jongdae produces her phone, blocks out the sound of Jongdae’s voice to count out thirty compressions that she hopes aren’t as clumsy as they feel. At thirty, she stops and checks for breathing, delivers mouth-to-mouth as the adrenaline starts to kick in. 

Five cycles later, the woman isn’t moving, and the ambulance hasn’t arrived. Junmyeon hears the sirens as she starts on cycle six, and they don’t get to the scene until she’s on cycle seven. The EMTs rush up with their equipment, and she tells them the count as they take over. They grimace, nod, and get right on to defibrillation. 

Unsurprisingly, defibrillation doesn’t work. Junmyeon wants to leave, not wanting to witness the nearly inevitable end to this, but they have to give a statement to the police. 

 

Junmyeon wakes up at noon the next day to the sound of Sehun’s alarm. Sehun pulls out of her grasp to shut it off, and Junmyeon has to force herself not to follow along to cling. They rarely share a bed these days, but the prospect of crawling into bed alone at three in the morning after the events of the night before had been more than she could handle.

“Are you okay?” Sehun asks. She’s typing something on her phone. “I can call in sick.”

“I’m fine,” Junmyeon says. “Go to work.”

It’s not the first time she’s lost a patient—she’d spent that day clinging to Sehun and Chanyeol both, but even being surrounded by big, breathing people had only done so much—but she’s not exposed to death often now that she’s solely a primary care physician. She’ll make it through the day, if unhappily.

Sehun’s phone dings, and she pauses to read it. “Tao says she’ll come over when she gets off work at one.”

Junmyeon smiles thinly and hugs Sehun. “Thank you.”

In the kitchen, Junmyeon makes coffee while Sehun gets dressed, listlessly going through the motions without paying much attention. She barely catches herself before she puts sugar into the coffee filter instead of coffee.

Jongdae stumbles out of Junmyeon’s room as the coffee drips into the pot. Her hair is a mess, her eyelids are puffy, and her makeup is smeared, and the excess fabric of the pajamas she’s borrowed from Junmyeon only serves to make her look rail-thin. She immediately sits at the table and rests her forehead against the wood. 

“Please tell me that was all some alcohol-induced dream,” she says. 

Junmyeon sighs and pours two cups of coffee. She dumps cream and sugar into her own cup and leaves Jongdae’s black. “Nope.”

Placing the coffee mugs on the table, Junmyeon rests her head in her hand while Jongdae stares off into space. She’s seen people die once or twice before, Junmyeon knows, but only during the two years of clinical rotations required to complete her MD-PhD program. That was a long time ago.

“Do you want to stay here today?” Junmyeon asks, but Jongdae shakes her head.

“Kyungsoo said she’d come get me,” Jongdae says, referencing a girlfriend Junmyeon has yet to meet. “Unless you need company?”

Junmyeon shakes her head. “Oh, but do I finally get to meet the famous Kyungsoo?”

Kyungsoo and Zitao arrive at the same time, and Junmyeon has to stifle a laugh at the height difference when she opens the door. She’d heard from Jongdae that Kyungsoo was small, which is a damning enough proclamation when it comes out of Jongdae’s mouth, but she looks like a child next to Zitao, even though Zitao is wearing flats. As Kyungsoo steps out of her shoes and into the house, Junmyeon tries to compare her height to her own and comes to the conclusion that she, too, most likely looks like a child next to Zitao.

After the proper pleasantries have been exchanged (and Kyungsoo has made lots of meaningful glances at the ill-fitting tracksuit Jongdae borrowed from Junmyeon after showering), Kyungsoo and Jongdae take their leave. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Zitao asks as soon as they’re alone. She sits on the couch, and Junmyeon sits next to her with a sigh and curls against her shoulder. She doesn’t say anything for several minutes.

“It was just really weird,” she says. “It was a young woman who looked like she’d been out having fun. There was nothing obviously wrong with her. Her wallet and phone were missing, but there weren’t any signs of a struggle. No drugs around, either.”

The police are on the case, but she wonders what they’ll even be able to find. It didn’t appear to be a murder, but who would steal the purse of a dying person instead of calling an ambulance?

Zitao drapes an arm around her shoulders and pulls her closer. “That is strange.” 

“And it was just down the street by the cleaners,” Junmyeon says. That part is unsettling for more selfish reasons. “So be careful if you’re walking around at night.”

At that, Zitao laughs. “Unnie, anybody who messes with me is going to regret it.”

Junmyeon frowns. “Like that cockroach did?”

“Hey,” Zitao pouts. “It did end up dead.”

It’s so cute that Junmyeon just has to kiss her, and then that feels nice, so she has to do it again. She ends up straddling Zitao’s lap for several minutes for a round of kissing that is far more constructive than worrying about someone she can’t help anymore.

“So how was work?” She asks when they finally break apart, hoping to change the subject.

“A four-year-old boy beat me up,” Zitao says. “It was actually kind of cute.”

“Four?” Junmyeon laughs. “How could a four-year-old beat you up?”

“Okay, it was more like my thigh,” Zitao grins. “I might have a bruise.”

“Do your coworkers know?” Junmyeon asks. It’s out of the blue, but she doesn’t know how to bring it up.

“Know what?” Zitao stares at her for a moment, eyebrows furrowed as she tries to figure out the meaning. “Oh, that I like girls?”

“Yeah,” Junmyeon says.

“Some do,” Zitao says. “I’m not trying to hide it from them. I’m bi, so I’m not telling everyone unless I have to.”

“You’re bi?” Junmyeon hadn’t known that, although it makes sense, given that she recalls Zitao dating a boy during college. Still, bisexuality isn’t really a thing she understands. Sehun is bi, but Sehun deliberately only dates people who fall under the queer umbrella, meaning practically only women because very few bisexual men seem to exist. “Then why not just date men?”

Zitao gives her a pinched smile, and Junmyeon suspects that Sehun would be smacking her for asking dumb questions right about now, if she were present. 

“Have you never developed feelings for someone you weren’t dating?” Zitao asks. 

Oh, Junmyeon thinks. She says it out loud for good measure.

“Yeah. I’d basically have to stop spending time with other women if I wanted to make sure I never fell for one,” Zitao says. “I just don’t think the whole world needs to know until it gets serious with someone.” 

Junmyeon nods and falls silent for a moment until Zitao speaks again. “Why did you decide to come out at work? It wasn’t really to get people to stop asking you out, was it?”

With a sigh, Junmyeon drops her head against Zitao’s shoulder and picks up one of her hands to mesh their fingers together, just to focus on something other than Zitao’s face. Pretending it’s about people asking her out makes it easier to pretend it doesn’t matter that much to her, so that she doesn’t have to see the confusion on the faces of people she cares about when she tells them the truth.

“I feel weird when people don’t know,” she says. “I end up holding back so often, when everyone’s talking about dates and crushes and weddings. It makes it hard to be friendly with the other people at work, because I feel like I’m lying all the time.”

“It’s not really their business to know, though, is it?” Zitao asks.

“No, but when I get to thinking about whose business is whose, it just feels unfriendly.” Junmyeon sighs again. “And it was hard, back when I was a resident and seeing Chanyeol. All of the other residents would commiserate about the strain on their relationships from their long hours, and I’d just listen without getting to join in because nobody knew I was in one.

“Chanyeol and I hardly ever had time to see each other, and when we did, it was cutting into time to see my friends or my family or sleep. My mom didn’t know about Chanyeol, so she’d always ask why I hardly ever visited, like I was a bad daughter, and I couldn’t just tell her the reason. 

“Once someone walked in on me crying in the locker room, and I didn’t even know what to say. I told her a childhood friend had passed away. I’d really just gotten stuck at work for an emergency when Chanyeol had come all the way across town to see me for the first time in two weeks.”

Zitao rubs her thumb in gentle circles against the back of Junmyeon’s hand. “That must have been awful.”

“It was,” Junmyeon smiles wanly. “I decided then that I would stop living a secret double life when I was out of my residency. It just took a while to follow through.”

This is where Junmyeon should be asking Zitao how serious a relationship needs to be before she tells her parents and how long she intends to be in Korea, but she falls silent instead. With Zitao’s parents in another country, she reasons that there won’t be much need to lie to them. There won’t be constant invitations to dinner and minor family events that Zitao will have to leave her behind to attend, at the very least, and that’s the only part that would affect Junmyeon in the short term.

She refuses to think too hard about whether Zitao’s mother pesters as much about marriage as most mothers do.

 

“How long have you been back in Korea, Zitao?” Junmyeon’s mother asks a week later. 

“About two months,” Zitao responds. Junmyeon’s stomach drops to her feet in horror. Clearly realizing her mistake, Zitao turns to look at her with wide eyes.

Dinner with Junmyeon’s family had been going far too well up until this point, Junmyeon reflects. Unfortunately, they’re really only about ten minutes into the actual dinner part of the dinner.

“Two months?” Junmyeon’s mother says. “I thought Seungyeon told me you two had been going out for longer than that.”

There’s not much for it. Junmyeon scratches her head and grimaces ruefully. “That’s because I lied to Seungyeon, Umma. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few weeks.”

“I knew it!” Seungyeon crows. “I knew there was no way you’d found yourself a girlfriend.”

Her mother’s eyebrows raise. “Why would you lie about that?”

Junmyeon watches her mother’s eyebrows rise higher and higher as she relates the tale. Beside her, Junmyeon’s father takes bite after bite of meat, taking advantage of his wife’s distraction to skip the vegetables. Junmyeon feels a surge of affection for her father, who couldn’t care less about her relationships.

“And then you decided to actually date her?” Junmyeon’s mother asks. “That’s…kind of sweet, even if I don’t understand the logic behind any of this.”

Shrugging, Junmyeon takes a bite of rice to delay her response. Her mother turns to Zitao instead. “What do you do, Zitao?”

“I’m an assistant manager of a martial arts school. My company sent me to Seoul to manage a branch opening here,” Zitao answers simply. She smiles, but she looks a little nervous. She must have been getting information out of Sehun, Junmyeon thinks, about just how snobby Junmyeon’s family is.

Junmyeon’s mother blinks, and her mouth twists down just a little, just for a moment. Then she smiles. “So that’s why you look so tough.”

Zitao smiles again and ducks her head.

“But you must be pretty good at what you do if they’re sending you abroad to open a school here,” Junmyeon’s mother continues, ever searching for a silver lining to the rainclouds in her mind.

“I’m not bad,” Zitao says, and Junmyeon knows this is self-deprecation. 

“Haven’t you won world championships?” Junmyeon asks. Her father looks up from his meal with wide eyes, presumably at the mention of competitive sports.

“A long time ago,” Zitao responds. “I retired from competition after my injury a few years ago.”

“Wow, really?” Seungyeon asks. “Are there videos online?”

Zitao nods. “Of course. I can send you a link, if you’d like.” 

“Maybe we can watch some after dinner,” Seungyeon’s husband suggests, to eager nods from the rest of the table.

Somehow the conversation shifts from Zitao to new developments about the Zika virus’s effects on the brains of infants, then. Seungyeon and Junmyeon’s father had both read a recent article about it that Seungyeon’s husband hadn’t, so they both go about explaining it to him, in detail. Outside of the three of them, the only other person at the table capable of comprehending the conversation is Junmyeon, and even she only has a tenuous grasp on what they mean. The human brain is complicated.

Her mother is used to these conversations and interjects questions where she can, but Zitao sits quietly, with her eyebrows knitting together more and more as the conversation gets increasingly complex. Korean words she doesn’t understand are probably flying over the table faster than she can grasp them, Junmyeon reflects. Feeling bad, she taps Zitao’s foot with her own and smiles apologetically when she looks over.

“This always happens,” she mouths, with an exaggerated roll of the eyes. Her mother catches her and tosses in a shrug with a smile that’s hardly rueful—“Oh, look at my family. They’re just so smart, they can’t help but leave our guests behind with their conversations. What can I do?” It says.

 

 

Zitao is quiet on the ride home. When she reaches a stoplight, Junmyeon glances over to find her staring out the window at the convenience store on the corner, glowing on an otherwise dark, deserted street.

After a brief check to make sure the light is still red, Junmyeon slides her hand onto Zitao’s shoulder. “Is everything okay?”

Zitao looks at her. “I don’t fit in with your family well, do I?”

Squeezing Zitao’s shoulder, Junmyeon smiles. “No, but I don’t, either.”

“More than I do,” Zitao says. “You at least know what that Zika virus is. I’ve only heard of it in passing.”

Junmyeon sighs and starts driving again when the light turns green. “I only know that because I went to medical school to make my parents happy.”

Looking back out the window, Zitao seems to curl in on herself. “I would never have gotten into medical school. I’m not that smart.”

Junmyeon knows very little, if anything, about Zitao’s intelligence, so she can’t realistically protest the statement. “Why does that matter? You’re kind, and strong, and you work hard. You’re very good at what you do.”

At that, Zitao turns back toward Junmyeon. “Hey, you missed one.”

“What?” Junmyeon spares her a glance as she turns down the street to the Oh-Kim apartment.

“You don’t think I’m pretty, Unnie?” Zitao pouts. 

“I didn’t say that!”

“Exactly; you didn’t say it!” Zitao’s fighting to keep her pout on as Junmyeon parks the car, most likely because she’s inordinately proud of herself for the comeback.

Junmyeon steals a kiss and ruffles Zitao’s hair before she gets out of the car. “You’re cute.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	4. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: workplace bullying, implied homophobia, apparent off-screen date rape attempt

It’s finally happened.

Ever since the holiday dinner, Junmyeon has managed to avoid running into people who work at the clinic at lunch, barring only Jongin. It’s not particularly hard because they don’t have a cafeteria. She just buys lunches to go at any of the many eateries around, and then she eats it in her favorite shady spot in the park, which is always open because it’s the middle of winter. ( _The cold never bothered me, anyway!_ She has thought with a snort nearly every day.)

But today, Jongin had been too behind schedule from trying to locate a whole set of supplies that had gone missing to catch where people were going, so she hadn’t been able to warn Junmyeon that half of the staff were getting together at the sandwich place.

Dr. Lee, Dr. Choi, the other Dr. Lee, and Nurses Kim, Cho, and Ahn are all sitting at two tables pushed together by the door, apparently halfway through a meal. Junmyeon nods at them like one normally nods at coworkers, notes dismay on two of the nurses’ and the second Dr. Lee’s face as Dr. Choi, Dr. Lee, and Nurse Kim all look past her like she doesn’t exist. The dismayed trio don’t call the others out on their behavior, and they don’t acknowledge Junmyeon any further. 

She gets in line and orders a turkey sub on whole wheat bread, toasted, with every vegetable available. 

“Eat in or takeout?” The cashier asks.

A quick glance at the tables near the door finds nothing but crumbs. 

“I’ll eat in,” Junmyeon says. At least they won’t be back to bother her.

 

“This is ridiculous,” Jongin says. “They’re acting like twelve-year-olds.”

It’s five-thirty, long after everyone else has left, and Junmyeon’s finally finished her last appointment. They haven’t pulled the doubling-up trick again, but hiding Jongin’s things put a dent in Junmyeon’s schedule, anyway. 

Junmyeon sighs and presses fingers into the tense spots on the back of her neck. “I’m sorry.”

She feels bad that the bullying has broadened to include Jongin, simply by virtue of being Junmyeon’s primary nurse and unwilling to join in. Nobody would deliberately bully Jongin, who’s about the most lovable person Junmyeon has ever met. 

“Don’t be silly, unnie,” Jongin says. “I know how bullying works. It’s not your fault they’re assholes.”

“If you want to look for another job, I’ll give you a good reference,” Junmyeon offers. “Don’t feel bad.”

There’s no telling if this will all blow over soon or continue until Junmyeon gives up and leaves. She doesn’t really know whether to stay or leave, herself, but she’s decided to wait a month or two longer. Hopefully the pranks won’t have dragged her reputation with her patients into the dirt by then.

“I’m not going anywhere if I don’t have to,” Jongin says, hurrying through her final cleanup. “I like working with you. You’re nice, and you’re Sehun’s friend, so I can whine to her if you ever stop being nice.”

Junmyeon smiles and gives Jongin a quick hug. “Who wouldn’t be nice to you? You’re the best person ever.”

Jongin gives Junmyeon a good squeeze before moving away. Her smile is small and maybe a little sad. “There have been people. Not-nice people don’t care how nice you are, if they think you’re in their way.”

That’s about the saddest thing Junmyeon has ever heard, and she tells Jongin as much. Then they’re both out the door, and Junmyeon texts Zitao as she walks. _Finally escaped. Want to get takeout?_

 

“Unnie, pull over,” Zitao says suddenly.

“What? Why?” Junmyeon looks for a spot to pull off the road, but they’re passing a busy bar. The street is lined with cars pulling up to and away from the curb. “Are you okay?”

“I am, but I’m not so sure about that woman,” Zitao says, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Can you let me off and catch up?”

There are still no open spots, but Zitao just opens the door and climbs out while Junmyeon is stuck behind someone who’s stopped in the third lane of the road with his blinker on, like he thinks he’s going to get up to the bar without having to circle around and come back.

“Zitao?” Junmyeon calls, but Zitao is already closing the door and running off. 

It’s after seven o’clock, and the smell of chicken filling the car is making Junmyeon’s stomach growl. Going out of the way to get takeout at rush hour had been a mistake, but Junmyeon had been bent on going to her favorite chicken place. Still, she’s more concerned than frustrated as she tries to find a spot to park the car.

A block away, she spots a small pay-for-parking lot just off the road with an open spot and dives into it, then sprints out of the parking lot and back the way she came.

There’s no sign of Zitao in front of the bar when Junmyeon arrives, though she looks and looks. She pauses to get her breath back as she passes the entrance and looks across the street, wondering if maybe the woman was on the other side of the street—she hadn’t even seen who Zitao was talking about. 

Seeing nothing, she looks back ahead of herself and keeps walking, expecting at any moment to hear sirens or to run into Zitao. They were in front of the bar when Zitao told her to stop, so the woman was probably a little farther down.

Just past the bar is a closed storefront with a recessed front entrance. It’s dark and hard to see, but when she’s a few feet away, Junmyeon sees a woman crouched in the entrance. She’s wearing a light dress under her coat and high heels, and she doesn’t look up as Junmyeon approaches.

“Miss, are you all right?” Junmyeon asks. The woman startles, like she didn’t hear Junmyeon coming. She looks up at Junmyeon with unfocused eyes.

“I don’t feel too good,” the woman says. She doesn’t seem too capable of explaining farther, but Junmyeon asks anyway.

“I don’t know, I was just kissing this guy, and I got all weak all of a sudden. I don’t know why. I didn’t have that much to drink. I couldn’t even stand on my own, but he wouldn’t stop kissing me.”

Junmyeon looks around, but she doesn’t see any men nearby. “Where did he go?”

“A girl,” the woman pauses and rests her forehead against her hand momentarily. “A girl came and chased him away.”

Shit. It doesn’t sound to Junmyeon like something Zitao would do at all, but between the lack of Zitao and the knowledge that she could most likely take down an unarmed grown man, it’s hard not to jump to conclusions. Still, there’s a clearly ill woman in front of Junmyeon at the moment.

“Let me call you an ambulance,” Junmyeon says. In all likelihood she’s been drugged. The woman nods.

As tempting as it is to run after Zitao, Junmyeon doesn’t feel right leaving an ill woman alone, especially so close to a bar. As soon as she’s off the phone with the emergency operator, she calls Zitao instead. When she gets no answer, she hangs up and calls again, and then again, but the phone just rings its usual amount and goes to voicemail the same every time. After the fourth try, she gives up and texts Zitao a plea to let her know if she’s safe.

It takes all of three agonizing minutes before she hears sirens, and then the police and the ambulance arrive at the same time.

The police get what description they can of the attacker before the medics decide it’s time to take the woman away, but she can’t really give them much more than his height, hair color, and which way he’d run. 

Junmyeon tries to take off in the direction the woman points almost immediately after giving the police a description of Zitao and her phone number, half out of her mind with worry, but one of the officers grabs her arm to stop her. 

“If this guy is dangerous, you’re just putting yourself in harm’s way,” says the officer whose hand is on her elbow. He’s only a few inches taller than her and has a baby face, but he also has the poise of someone who’s packing a lot of muscle under his uniform.

Junmyeon deflates with a sigh. She knows that he’s right, but she can’t stand being unable to do anything to help. 

A second police car pulls up with sirens screaming, presumably backup, and the officers spill out and confer with the first pair as the ambulance drives away. Short stuff passes Junmyeon off to one of the new officers, then, and takes off with his partner in the direction that Zitao was supposed to have run.

The new police officer offers to escort Junmyeon back to her car and says they’ll call when they have more information. 

 

By ten o’clock, all the information they’ve received is that Zitao’s phone had been tracked to a spot about a block away from the scene of the incident—they can’t even really call it a crime—sans Zitao herself. That there was no sign of foul play near the phone is the only hopeful bit of information they can provide.

Junmyeon is sitting on the couch with Sehun and Minseok, with the TV playing the news on silent just in case any information hits there before the police call. Technically, Junmyeon is hardly the first person they should notify if anything serious were to happen to Zitao, but Zitao’s closest relatives are all in China. Junmyeon doesn’t know how the police even go about contacting next of kin when the next of kin is in another country, so it could easily be hours before she finds out anything.

Sehun yawns and curls up against Minseok’s shoulder, and Junmyeon considers telling them to go to bed and let her listen for the phone. Medical school and residency taught her to handle being awake for insane amounts of time, but Sehun hasn’t been to medical school.

They all jump when Junmyeon’s phone starts to ring. She’s swiping to answer the call even before she processes that it’s from a number she doesn’t recognize.

“Unnie,” Zitao’s voice says into the phone. “Can you come get me?”

“Tao?” Junmyeon says. Sehun sits up and leans toward the other side of the phone, like she can hear if she gets close enough. Maybe she can. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m fine,” Zitao says. She gives Junmyeon the intersection of two streets and tells her there’s a convenience store at the corner where she’ll be waiting.

Sehun is getting up to grab a coat even before Junmyeon, without bothering to change out of her pajama pants. Junmyeon is still in the clothes she wore to the chicken place earlier, so she grabs her own coat without commenting on Sehun’s choices. Minseok trails behind them, clearly not sure if she’s invited, but Sehun takes her hand and directs her to the front seat when they reach the parking lot.

 

 

They find Zitao outside the convenience store, with one hand tucked oddly into her coat. Her eyes are closed, head tipped back against the wall of the coffee shop, hair falling out of its ponytail. Sehun jumps out of the car to rush to her side as soon as Junmyeon pulls up to the curb, and she lifts her head slowly, like she’d been sleeping. 

They have a brief conversation that Junmyeon can’t hear, and then they come to the car slowly, like Zitao is hurt. She drops into the car seat when Sehun opens the door for her and tilts her head back against the headrest as soon as she’s scooted over to allow Sehun in. Her eyes droop closed again. 

“Thank you for coming to pick me up, Unnie,” she says.

“Are you okay?” Junmyeon asks, pulling away from the curb and wondering if they should go to the police or a hospital.

“Yes, but I need you to take me to the school,” Zitao says.

“The school?” Junmyeon asks, perplexed. 

“Where I teach,” Zitao says. “I need help.”

“What, why?” Junmyeon asks. “What do you need help with that you can get at the school?”

“I mean your help. I’ll explain when we get there.” 

Sehun gasps in the back seat. Junmyeon looks up to see her looking under the flap of Zitao’s coat in the mirror, but she’s missed whatever was wrong. It must be medical, if she wants Junmyeon’s help.

“Shouldn’t we go to a hospital if you need my help?”

“No,” Zitao says. “That would require too much explaining.”

Her words come out slowly, and she sounds exhausted. Junmyeon hesitates until Sehun snaps at her to follow Zitao’s directions.

Zitao’s school is on the third floor of a nondescript, multi-use commercial building. Junmyeon unbuckles her seatbelt, expecting to go up, but Zitao tells her to stay in the car. Ushering Sehun ahead of her instead, she says, “We’ll be right back.”

She comes back carrying a small set of keys on a lanyard and directs Junmyeon to a small clinic several blocks away. The lights are out in the windows, and the sign on the door indicates that it’s closed.

The key Zitao retrieved from the school opens the door to the clinic. She fumbles around inside for a minute before Minseok gently moves her out of the way and slips in. The lights come on shortly after.

“Have you been here before?” Zitao asks, eyebrows twitching upward. 

“My ex works here,” Minseok explains. “Or she used to, anyway. I don’t know if she still does. Have you met Lu Han?”

Zitao nods. “She’s visiting family in China at the moment.”

“So that’s why you’d need Junmyeon’s help,” Minseok says. 

Junmyeon is starting to feel very lost, but she doesn’t even know what to ask to figure out what’s going on.

“Yes, and the other after-hours doctor had to leave town last night for a family emergency,” Zitao nods. She walks back to the door by the closed reception desk and opens it, beckoning for the others to follow. Once through, she lets herself into an examination room, pulls out the paper to cover the bed, and sits on it. 

The cause of Sehun’s earlier gasp is clear when Zitao opens her coat and tugs it down her shoulder enough to reveal a bloody rag in the hand she’s had inside her coat, pressed to her shoulder. From the rough edge of her shirt, Junmyeon guesses that the rag was improvised.

Pulling the rag away, Junmyeon examines the wound. It extends several inches over Zitao’s shoulder and will definitely require stitches. She’s immediately hit by a wave of concern, even anger, about what happened, but she squelches her emotions. Taking care of the wound comes first.

“What caused this?” She asks. 

“A metal railing,” Zitao says. When Junmyeon tugs at the lapels of her coat, she gets the message and holds her arms out so that Junmyeon can remove it.

Junmyeon nods. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Tetanus?” Zitao asks.

“I’ll look that up in Chinese,” Minseok offers, frowning at a smartphone, so Junmyeon passes on trying to explain.

“Do you know where they keep sutures, Tao?” She asks as she washes her hands. Zitao directs her to a cabinet.

It’s odd to be doing this on someone she knows, Junmyeon reflects as she cleans the wound. Zitao’s breath hisses in through her teeth when Junmyeon has to remove debris from the wound, and she wishes she could hold Zitao’s hand and make her feel better instead of having to poke and prod; it’s Sehun who’s got hand-holding duty instead.

When the local anesthetic draws a little whine going in, she can’t help but to deliver a small kiss to Zitao’s forehead once she’s taken the needle away.

“You’re doing good, Tao,” she says. 

Minseok clears her throat behind them. Junmyeon practically jumps away to get her sutures, embarrassed, while Minseok says something to Zitao in halting Chinese. 

“Oh,” Zitao says in Korean. “I got that three years ago, Unnie.”

“Her tetanus shot,” Minseok clarifies. 

No need for a new one, then. Junmyeon nods.

It’s only after she’s finished with the last stitch and applied a bandage that she allows her thoughts to go back to their evening and the context of the injury.

“Now, do you care to explain what happened?” She asks.

Zitao lets out an exhausted sigh and sways a bit in her seat on the examination bed. “Can I explain tomorrow?”

It’s hard to stick to her guns when Zitao looks so tired. Junmyeon finds herself taking the opposite side of Zitao from Sehun and helping her to the car without pressing, although she eventually insists that she needs to call the police, who probably think she’s been abducted.

“Tell them I’m uninjured. I lost my phone, and I got lost. I didn’t follow the guy far.” Zitao says. When Junmyeon starts to protest, she adds. “If they think I got in a fight, they might deport me.”

“So you’re just going to let him go free? To attack other people?” Junmyeon asks, incredulous. 

Another thought occurs to her, but it’s difficult to imagine that _Zitao_ , of all people, would do such a thing. Still, Junmyeon would never have expected Zitao to go chasing after a criminal in the first place, so she’s clearly misjudged something. She turns around in her seat to watch Zitao’s reaction; Minseok is driving, this time, because she’d claimed to be the least upset person there.

Zitao curls against Sehun in the tiniest ball she can manage, like she’s hiding from a scolding mother. “I’ll explain tomorrow, I promise.”

The glare Sehun levels at Junmyeon when she opens her mouth to object is terrifying, so she clamps her mouth shut. Sehun has one arm around Zitao’s back, and Junmyeon feels an inexplicable wave of some sort of irritation trickle into her head. Can’t she be upset with Zitao without Sehun interfering? In a huff, mostly because she’s aware that she’s being unreasonable, she turns back to face the road and calls the police to deliver Zitao’s lie.

 

Back at the apartment, Junmyeon half expects Sehun to drag Zitao to bed with her to protect her from Junmyeon, but Minseok’s presence complicates things. Sehun does briefly try a sideways shuffle toward her room while still holding Zitao’s hand, but Zitao slips away.

“I can sleep on the couch,” she suggests, looking between Sehun and Minseok and avoiding Junmyeon’s eyes. Her shoulders are practically around her ears, she’s so tense.

For all she’s concerned and frustrated, and maybe more frustrated than the situation calls for because of the events at work earlier in the day, Junmyeon wouldn’t make an injured Zitao sleep on the couch.

“Nobody’s making you sleep on the couch, Taozi,” Junmyeon insists. “You’ve slept in my bed before.”

Zitao slinks after Junmyeon like a dog following a command to heel when she knows she’s just done something bad. It makes Junmyeon uncomfortable, as does Sehun watching her like a hawk until she’s through the door. 

Once they’re safely in her room and out of Sehun’s line of sight, Junmyeon gets up on her toes and kisses Zitao quickly. She doesn’t really want to kiss Zitao, not when she still doesn’t know exactly what happened, but she also doesn’t want to spend the night sleeping next to a tense Zitao.

The kiss gets her a tentative smile from Zitao and an arm around her shoulders when they’re in bed. Junmyeon tells herself that the lingering tension in Zitao’s back is due to her injury, not anxiety. She doesn’t really believe herself. 

At the very least, she’s glad that it’s a Friday night, so that she won’t have to deal with both Zitao and the work situation in the morning.

 

 

It’s late in the morning when Junmyeon wakes up, after a long night of her brain keeping her awake with all of the possible things Zitao could have done. Given that Zitao generally works on Saturday mornings, Junmyeon isn’t expecting to get the actual answer until the afternoon.

She’s surprised, therefore, to hear Zitao’s voice coming from the direction of the kitchen.

“Did you call in sick?” Junmyeon asks through a yawn as she walks into the kitchen. Zitao is at the table with Sehun and Minseok, who Junmyeon notes looks just as adorable as always even with her hair sticking up at improbable angles and puffy morning eyelids.

Zitao nods and lifts her shoulder. “I told them it was the doctor’s orders. I hope you don’t mind.”

Junmyeon smiles on her way to the coffee maker. “It’s definitely for the best to avoid tearing those stitches.”

There’s still hot coffee in the pot. Junmyeon almost wishes that hadn’t been the case, so that she could delay the inevitable conversation by making more coffee. Instead, she pours a cup and walks to the table, ruffling Sehun’s hair as she walks by.

“Look at you, out of bed before me,” Junmyeon comments. Sehun responds with a grumbling noise that Junmyeon is fairly certain contains no actual words.

Their kitchen table is designed for four people, but it feels cramped with that many people actually sitting at it. Junmyeon sits down next to Sehun and across from Zitao, and the three women already sitting fall silent and look at her. It’s clear that they’re expecting her to say something.

“You said you’d explain what happened last night,” Junmyeon says. 

Zitao nods, but her shoulders hunch up to her ears. She runs her thumb along the pattern at the base of her cup and stares down at the contents instead of looking at Junmyeon. 

Eventually she takes a deep breath and lets it out, then opens her mouth as if she’s about to speak, but she pauses and looks at Minseok like she’d forgotten Minseok was there.

“I think I already know, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Minseok says. “I know what kind of patients Lu Han treats.”

Zitao nods and gives her a tight smile, then looks to Junmyeon. Junmyeon waits.

“Remember how we were joking about Minseok-unnie being a soul-eating demon before Sehunnie’s first date with her?”

“Should I be offended?” Minseok asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“It was a joke,” Sehun jumps in, looking panicked. Dropping the unimpressed look, Minseok pats Sehun’s hand reassuringly on the table.

“Anyway,” Junmyeon prompts, looking away from the casual display of affection.

“Anyway,” Zitao says. “Soul-eating demons aren’t really a joke.”

She looks at Junmyeon like she’s expecting Junmyeon to say something, but Junmyeon just stares at her. Soul-eating demons?

When Zitao doesn’t continue, Junmyeon tries saying that last bit out loud.

“They exist,” Zitao says. “I fight them.”

Whatever Junmyeon was expecting to hear, it wasn’t this. She looks quickly at Sehun and Minseok, hoping for a hint of a smile to tell her this is a practical joke. They look back at her with straight faces.

“Are you serious?” Junmyeon asks.

Zitao nods. 

“You fight soul-eating demons?” Junmyeon asks, figuring she should clarify just to be sure.

Zitao nods.

“Huh?” Junmyeon is out of words.

“I don’t think she’s getting it,” Sehun says.

“Can you explain in more detail?” Junmyeon tries. “Demons?”

“That’s what we call them,” Minseok offers. “But it might be easier to think of them as soul vampires.”

“They feed on human souls,” Zitao says. “It kills the human when they do it. That’s why we hunt them, to keep them from killing people.”

“But how?” Junmyeon asks. “Why haven’t I heard of people being attacked by demons before?”

“They look human,” Zitao says. “And most people don’t realize they’re being attacked until it’s too late. They introduce themselves to their prey somewhere you’d expect to meet a stranger, then they kind of make it so you can’t think straight?” Zitao waves her hands like she’s not sure of the word she’s looking for.

“Like hypnosis,” Minseok offers.

“Yes, like that,” Zitao says. “They use that to get you somewhere alone, and then they suck out your soul. Your brain dies as your soul leaves.”

“That still can’t be very common,” Junmyeon says. “Wouldn’t we hear about a large number of sudden deaths like that? The woman last night was young. Healthy young people don’t often die like that.”

The woman she’d found on the way home from the bar with Jongdae floats to mind. She’d certainly fit the bill for healthy, young, and sudden death.

“It’s not very common,” Zitao says. “There’s been a spike in Seoul lately. That’s why I was sent here.”

Junmyeon looks to Sehun. “Did you know about this?”

“I knew about Tao,” Sehun says. “I didn’t know Minseok-unnie knew about this.”

“I used to do what Tao does,” Minseok says. “I lost the ability to several years ago.”

“Ability?” Junmyeon asks. This is all very confusing. 

“They can’t just be killed,” Zitao explains. “It requires the ability to use certain weapons.”

“Like a gun?”

“Like this,” Zitao says. She gestures with her hand, and there’s a little pop and a rush of air, and Junmyeon stares.

In Zitao’s hand is a knife. It’s not a particularly big knife, but it’s also not anything she would have found in Junmyeon’s apartment. The slim handle is black, the short blade silver and double-sided. In weapons terminology, it’s probably a dagger.

There’s also a faint green glow around the blade.

When she can tear her eyes away from the knife, Junmyeon finds that she’s the only person at the table surprised. Sehun is looking at her instead of the knife, and Minseok is eyeing the knife with curiosity instead of surprise.

“Yours are green,” Minseok observes. “Mine were always blue.”

Junmyeon checks under the table, certain that she’ll find a bag or something in Zitao’s lap where she could have hidden the weapon, but all she finds is Zitao’s pajama-clad legs. Straightening up, she finds Zitao smirking at her and Minseok hiding a grin behind her hand.

Before Junmyeon can say anything, Zitao uncurls her fingers and lets the knife fall over the table. It winks out of existence with another pop before it can hit the wood.

Junmyeon checks under the table just to be sure, but there’s no knife to be found.

“How did you do that?” She asks.

“It’s hard to explain,” Zitao says. “I can summon them. Not everyone can.”

“So there are demons running around stealing people’s souls, but only people who can summon those weapons can protect themselves?”

Zitao grimaces. “Basically. There are ways you can break out of their hypnosis, and then you have a good chance of getting away. They’re really not very common, though. The demons, I mean.”

“That’s nice, I guess,” Junmyeon says. She’s not sure about any of this. Demons? Magical weapons? Has she fallen into a comic book world? Everyone around the table looks dead serious, and Junmyeon just wants to giggle hysterically or go back to bed and hopefully wake up in a world that makes sense.

She looks at Zitao, who looks back at her with wide, serious eyes. Zitao isn’t joking. 

Standing up abruptly, Junmyeon excuses herself to the shower. She needs to think, and she can’t think very well with three women staring at her. 

In the shower, she stands under the spray for a long while, her mind running in circles. Zitao is a demon hunter. There are soul-eating demons out eating the souls of people in Seoul. Does Junmyeon actually believe any of this? Zitao’s knife had seemed real enough, but maybe it was an illusion.

That’s all the proof she has, really, that Zitao was telling the truth. The woman last night had been confused, but that could have been caused by any number of things. The woman Junmyeon hadn’t been able to rescue two weeks ago may have died of other causes. Zitao’s injury was definitely something a human could have managed with a weapon or a railing.

But why would Zitao lie to her? The only reason Junmyeon can come up with is to cover up for taking justice into her own hands with a human rapist. Would Zitao do that?

It’s somehow easier to imagine Zitao as a demon hunter than as a vigilante. It’s hard enough to imagine Zitao doing anything violent, and she’s always been so obedient. If anything, she’d trap a rapist to deliver to the police, not do something so unspeakable to him that she has to make up a far-fetched tale to tell Junmyeon.

By the time she’s finished showering, Junmyeon has reached no conclusions. She scrubs around her ears again, then her feet, being extra thorough just to put off facing the other people in her apartment. Eventually she runs out of excuses, so she turns off the water.

After she’s towel dried her hair within an inch of its life, she steps out to find Sehun leaning against the wall across from the bathroom, glaring at her.

“Zitao went home,” she says. “She felt uncomfortable.”

“That’s too bad,” Junmyeon frowns. She’s been selfish, she knows. Zitao is in pain, and they should be taking care of her.

“You’re not going to break up with her, are you?” Sehun asks.

“Umm,” Junmyeon says. She hadn’t really thought this through that far. “I don’t know?”

“Unnie, you _can’t_ ,” Sehun insists. “You’ll break her heart.”

Junmyeon sighs. “That’s not how relationships work, Sehunnie. You know that.”

She’d been so worried, when Zitao had disappeared, and then again when she’d turned up hurt. Junmyeon has never enjoyed adrenaline rushes, and part of the appeal of her job in primary care was limiting the number of patients she has that she can’t help. Having a girlfriend who’s prone to going off the grid in dangerous situations might be more than she can take. 

All Junmyeon really wants is a quiet, peaceful life with the people she cares about. Why is that always so far out of reach?


	5. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 warning: more stuff that reads vaguely like attempted date rape but isn’t

“You know,” Jongdae says over her beer, watching Junmyeon tip back her third white Russian in the space of an hour. “There are way cheaper places to get smashed, if that was your goal. Also, you do know you have work tomorrow, right?”

“Soju wouldn’t taste as good,” Junmyeon points out. “And I might as well enjoy having lots of money if I’m going to make lots of money.”

She doesn’t dignify the comment about work with a response, because she doesn’t want to tell the people she’s with about her problems there.

“Trouble in paradise?” Baekhyun asks. She’s still working on what looks like the same fruity drink she ordered when they came in. Junmyeon feels betrayed; Baekhyun usually at least keeps up with her.

“How could you have trouble with Tao?” Jongdae asks. “I thought she was the nicest person ever.”

The nicest person ever who also happens to be a demon hunter, with whom Junmyeon hasn’t spoken in days because she doesn’t know how to handle the demon hunter news. She’s an ass, and she knows it.

There’s no way that Junmyeon can explain to her friends that Zitao hunts soul-eating demons in her off time. She sighs instead, hoping her friends will accept that as an answer and move on.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

“Then this is probably a bad time to break some other news,” Baekhyun says, pulling a strawberry out of her drink and practically fellating it. Next to her, Jongdae puts her face into her hands and mutters something that sounds like, “Baekhyun, no.”

But Baekhyun is Baekhyun, and Baekhyun would not be Baekhyun if Baekhyun were to choose to listen to the voice of reason. Therefore, Baekhyun carries on. 

“I just thought you should know that I’m seeing Chanyeol.”

“Oh,” Junmyeon looks around for their waitress. Three white Russians were not enough for this conversation.

She’d seen this coming ages ago, even before she broke up with Chanyeol, but she’d thought that Chanyeol was to Baekhyun what Sehun was to her, maybe. Except that Baekhyun always looked at Chanyeol so sweetly, like she was the best thing in the universe. Not like a best friend.

She shouldn’t care. She doesn’t care. They broke up ages ago.

“I’m happy for you,” she says. That part’s not hard.

What’s going to be hard is Baekhyun’s inevitable gushing. Baekhyun’s as capable of keeping quiet about her significant others as she is of passing up a pair of cute sneakers, and Junmyeon doesn’t need to hear about how wonderful Chanyeol is. Junmyeon is well aware of how wonderful Chanyeol is.

Attempting to take another sip of her white Russian, Junmyeon tips her head back and gets nothing. She looks into her glass and is disappointed to find it empty, and oh, right, she’d been looking for the waitress for a reason. She finally manages to catch the woman’s eye and order another drink. 

As the waitress leaves, Junmyeon looks back across the table to find Jongdae giving her a worried look. Junmyeon shrugs at her. What’s she supposed to do? Chanyeol’s happily involved with someone, and Junmyeon’s only just started to think she could have feelings for someone again, only to find out that the person she picked is a fucking demon hunter. 

The waitress comes back with her drink and sets it down with a gesture at a man at the bar dressed in a crisp black suit. “This drink’s on that gentleman.”

The man is watching Junmyeon when she follows the waitress’s gaze. She’s never seen him before in her life, she’s pretty sure, although she occasionally doesn’t recognize her patients’ parents when she runs into them without their children in tow. He nods at her and smiles, and she nods and smiles back, feeling oddly not uncomfortable. Normally she feels awkward when men buy her drinks, like she suddenly owes them something that she’s not willing or able to give them. 

“I’m glad you’re okay with it,” Baekhyun is saying. Junmyeon tears her attention away from the man at the bar and reluctantly back to Baekhyun. “I was afraid that with your history…”

Baekhyun’s smile is beautiful, with her crinkly nose and neat, pointy teeth. She’s a sweet girl, if often self-centered and clueless, and Junmyeon really does wish her well. It’s not fair to be frustrated with her because of her choice of romantic partner.

“It’s fine,” Junmyeon says. 

“She really is the sweetest girl ever,” Baekhyun says. “I thought you might not be over her. I mean, I can’t imagine ever getting over her.”

Switch ‘clueless’ to ‘really, _really_ fucking clueless.’ Of course Chanyeol was hard to get over. Chanyeol was sweet. Chanyeol bought her roses and used to talk about what they’d wear to their hypothetical wedding. 

_”Do you want to wear a dress?” She’d ask. ”I want to wear a fluffy white Western-style dress. If we both wear dresses, do we have to match? Like, the same dress?”_

_And Junmyeon would laugh at the mental image of the two of them, with their very different body types, in the same dress of Chanyeol’s choosing. It would probably be horrendously ruffly._

_“I’ll wear a tux,” she’d offered instead. Chanyeol would look better than Junmyeon in a tux, but she’d look best in whatever made her smile that thousand-watt smile. If that was a frilly white dress, so be it._

Chanyeol had always hoped that they’d be able to have a wedding one day.

Now Baekhyun’s face supersedes Junmyeon’s own in her imaginary wedding with Chanyeol. It bothers her the most that she doesn’t have someone to replace Chanyeol’s with for herself. She wonders if it’s harder to find a new love than it is to lose an old love.

Suddenly, getting out of the whole situation is more important than finishing her fourth drink. Getting to her feet, Junmyeon stuffs herself into her coat and buttons it unsteadily.

“You’re leaving?” Jongdae asks. She starts to get up, but Junmyeon stops her.

“I don’t want to ruin your night,” she says. “I’m just not feeling well. I’ll grab a taxi.”

Afraid that Jongdae will insist, which in turn will make Junmyeon feel like even more of an ass than she already feels, she lurches toward the door and outside before Jongdae can say anything else.

She should really call a cab like she said she would, but she doesn’t want to. The cold air outside is bracing, whereas a cab would be stuffy and nauseating. Her stomach twists just thinking about it. The world wobbles when she tries to walk down the street, so she takes a moment to lean against the wall of the bar while her head clears.

Outside in the cold air, Chanyeol feels more like the distant memory she ought to be to Junmyeon. It’s easier to call Zitao to mind instead, with her sweet smiles and polite posture. Not quite as loud and pushy as Chanyeol, although Junmyeon suspects that she’ll be more demanding when she’s more certain of Junmyeon. 

She should call Zitao to talk once she’s sobered up. Zitao is nice.

To that end, she’ll need to do some sobering up. Something hydrating might help, and she has hydrating things at home.

A hand lands on her arm as she starts down the street in the direction of her apartment. She nearly jumps out of her skin in surprise before turning around to find the man who’d bought her a drink. 

“Are you okay, miss?” He asks, all polite concern. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

Right. She’d left before she’d had more than a sip of the drink he’d bought her. Following someone outside to apologize for something so insignificant is a little over the top, but she’ll take it. This man seems nice enough.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Junmyeon says. “I just didn’t feel well all of a sudden.”

“I see,” the man says. “I’m sorry. There’s a convenience store down the street if you’d like some water.”

He’s leading Junmyeon by the arm before she can even protest. She follows his lead anyway, because she wants water. She feels like she can trust this man, even if he’s forgotten to tell her his name. 

“I’m Kim Junmyeon,” she tries. A little hint can go a long way.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man says. “I should have introduced myself. My name is Jung Yunho.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Jung Yunho-sshi.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Kim Junmyeon-sshi.”

The convenience store is a short two blocks away, but Junmyeon has almost remembered how to walk properly when they get there. She grabs a water from the refrigerated section despite the cold and goes to pay, but Jung Yunho insists on buying it for her. 

Opening her mouth to protest—it’s really awkward to let men get this far when she’s not interested in dating them—she notices that the cashier is giving them a knowing smile. She must think they’re a couple. There’s no need to humiliate the man over something as insignificant as a bottle of tea, so Junmyeon decides to wait until they’re outside before bursting his bubble.

Outside, Jung Yunho steers them to a quiet, narrow side street that’s partially hidden from the crowds on the main street by an oddly placed advertisement so that Junmyeon can drink her tea. He even opens the bottle for her. It’s all very gentlemanly, and it’s just too bad that Junmyeon’s not particularly interested in gentlemen. 

“So what do you do, Jung Yunho-sshi?” She asks for the sake of small talk. She takes a sip of her drink. 

“I’m an investment banker,” he says. “What about you?”

There’s something odd going on, but Junmyeon can’t quite put her finger on it. Jung Yunho has a pleasant face and a pleasant build. It’s distracting.

“I’m a pediatrician,” she says. She takes another sip of tea. Jung Yunho steps a bit closer to her. He’s wearing cologne.

“That’s wonderful.”

“I’m not single, by the way,” she says. That’s probably safer than telling him she’s a lesbian.

“Oh,” he seems a little sad, but he doesn’t move away. “Does that matter?”

It really ought to matter. It also ought to matter that he’s a man. But the reasons why those things should matter won’t stay put in her head long enough for her to think them properly. Yunho steps closer again and leans into her space. All she can see is his lips.

Her hands drift up to rest on his chest as he leans down. Most people she kisses don’t have such firm pecs. She presses her fingers down and giggles a little. “You’re strong.”

“I work out,” Yunho says, with a smirk that somehow manages to be polite. Junmyeon is wondering how you make a smirk polite when he finally closes the distance and kisses her.

It’s not right. It doesn’t feel quite right, even though it doesn’t really feel bad. Aside from the lack of sexual arousal, she feels a strange, foggy happiness. Then there’s a weird tugging sensation in her throat, like something’s coming out, and panic seeps through the foggy happy feeling. She tries to shove at Yunho’s chest, but her arms won’t comply with her brain’s signal to move.

The fog in her head gets heavier and heavier, but she still can’t move to fight Yunho off. A weightcreeps up her limbs, from her fingers and toes toward her body, until the only thing keeping her upright is Yunho’s arms around her.

Then, suddenly, they aren’t around her anymore, and she lands on her side on the hard concrete, barely getting a leaden hand out in time to keep her head from hitting the ground. The world spins when she turns her head to see what’s going on. 

A tall, slender woman is crouched over Yunho’s supine figure on the ground. Junmyeon hadn’t heard her approach, but she must have knocked Yunho to the ground when she ripped him off of Junmyeon. Junmyeon’s vision blurs and slides, making it hard to see what’s going on or her heroine’s face, but then she raises a hand, and then there’s a pop and something green and glowing appears in her hand. 

Without a moment of hesitation, the woman slams the green thing in her hand down and into Yunho’s neck. 

Yunho’s body morphs into...something big and gray. Junmyeon can’t see much detail through her blurry vision, and then the gray thing melts away into the pavement until there’s nothing left.

The woman approaches Junmyeon, and her face gradually resolves into a fuzzy Zitao as the scent of oranges hits Junmyeon’s nose. Zitao looks worried, Junmyeon thinks as she crouches down in front of her.

“Unnie, are you okay?” Zitao asks. 

Junmyeon isn’t sure if she’s okay, and her mouth is so uncooperative that only a mumble comes out when she tries to speak. Idly, she wonders if she’s going to die like that woman by the cleaners. That thought should make her panic, but it doesn’t. She tries to muster some panicked feeling out of curiosity, but she can’t find any. She must have used up all of her capacity for panic earlier.

“If I turn around, can you climb on my back?” Zitao asks. 

When Junmyeon nods, Zitao turns around and offers her back to Junmyeon. Junmyeon’s arms feel like she’s holding eight pound dumbbells when she lifts them to wrap over Zitao’s shoulders, but she makes it. 

Zitao’s hands hitch under her thighs and tug her close, and then she stands up cautiously, leaning forward to keep Junmyeon on her back. Junmyeon presses her nose against the hair at the nape of Zitao’s neck as Zitao starts walking. She dozes to the rhythm of Zitao’s steps and the scent of her perfume.

Soon the fog starts to recede from Junmyeon’s mind, and she wakes up. Looking up, she finds that they’re a block away from her apartment. Her limbs still don’t feel normal, but they’re not as heavy as they were. 

“’m I gonna die, Taozi?” She slurs at Zitao as they wait for the walk light at a crosswalk. Several strangers turn to look at her, but then they look away when they see her on Zitao’s back. She must look like a drunk with a really dedicated friend.

“No,” Zitao says. “You wouldn’t be awake still if you were going to die.”

That gets them a few more stares, and Zitao falls silent as she carries Junmyeon across the street and up to her apartment building. 

Mrs. Jung from the floor above Junmyeon’s gets into the elevator with them and stares openly at Zitao, who smiles as politely as she can manage. Addressing Junmyeon, Mrs. Jung says, “It must be nice for a drunk like you to have strong friends.”

Sometimes Junmyeon wonders what crawled up Mrs. Jung’s ass and died. She manages a fake sheepish smile, like she’s reflecting on her poor choices in life instead of thinking that Mrs. Jung is full of shit, and then Zitao is carrying her out of the elevator and depositing her on her feet in front of her door. 

“Where’s your key?” Zitao asks, and Junmyeon digs it out of her pocket. Before she can try to insert it in the lock with clumsy fingers, Zitao takes the key from her hand and does it for her.

When they’re inside, Zitao starts talking again. “The weakness and confusion are just from the hypnosis, Unnie. If he’d gotten any of your soul out, you would have passed out.”

She helps Junmyeon limp to the couch and flop onto it.

“How’d you find me?” Junmyeon asks.

“Jongdae called Sehun because she was worried about you leaving abruptly, and Sehun called me because she’s at Minseok’s.”

Junmyeon nods. Minseok’s place is far away, although the fog in her head is blocking her from the name of the neighborhood. 

Zitao flits away in the direction of the kitchen, and Junmyeon flops back against the arm of the couch, feeling cold and oddly depressed. When Zitao comes back with a glass of water and passes it to her, Junmyeon sets it down on the coffee table and clings to Zitao’s hips until Zitao sits next to her on the couch, whereupon she wraps herself around Zitao like a koala on a telephone pole.

“The water will help you feel better,” Zitao says. 

“Not as better as you do,” Junmyeon responds into the skin just below Zitao’s collarbone.

Wrapping her arms around Junmyeon, Zitao rearranges them until they’re lying back on the couch, with Junmyeon mostly on top of Zitao. They lie like that for several minutes before the memory of the demon kissing her floods into the forefront of Junmyeon’s mind. She shudders and stretches up to kiss Zitao, like it’ll erase the last kiss from her lips.

Zitao kisses back quietly, following Junmyeon’s lead without pushing for more and cupping one hand around the back of Junmyeon’s neck. Her other hand rubs soothing circles into Junmyeon’s lower back. Eventually Junmyeon breaks the kiss and rests her head against Zitao’s chest to let the rise and fall of her breaths lull her to sleep.

 

In the morning, Junmyeon wakes to the blaring of her alarm. The first thing she notices as she gropes for her phone to turn it off is that she has a giant, throbbing headache. 

The second thing she notices is that she’s the only one in her bed. That’s odd, because she could’ve sworn Zitao had stayed last night. Junmyeon searches her memory and is able to pull up a blurry memory of being carried to bed at some unknown hour, but she doesn’t remember what Zitao did after that. 

In the living room, she spots a telltale mop of dark hair spilling over the arm of the sofa. Upon closer inspection, Zitao is lying on her side across the cushions, fully clothed like she hadn’t intended to fall asleep there.

Junmyeon is so busy being confused about Zitao’s decision not to sleep with her (or even in Sehun’s bed) that it takes until she’s walked into the kitchen to get breakfast that she realizes something’s off about the apartment.

Turning on her heel to look back, she stops and stares.

There’s nothing in the living room that isn’t exactly where it belongs. There are no books on the end tables, papers on the floor, or empty cups that need to be cleaned still on coasters. The DVDs are all put away. Various hoodies and sweaters that have been living on the backs of chairs and the couch are nowhere to be seen.

In short, it doesn’t look like Junmyeon and Sehun live there.

Briefly worried that she’s somehow woken up in someone else’s apartment—maybe she and Zitao went to the wrong door last night?—Junmyeon rushes back to the kitchen. The coffee pot is still right where it belongs, with the little silver jar for coffee right next to it, and Junmyeon’s adorable bunny-printed potholders are in their drawer. 

There just aren’t any dirty dishes to be seen, and the coffee stains are gone from the countertop.

Spinning back around, she stares at Zitao’s sleeping form. What kind of woman saves her girlfriend’s life and then cleans her apartment in the middle of the night?

Waking Zitao up after all of that would be cruel, Junmyeon thinks, so she decides to pick up breakfast on her way to work rather than risk making noise in the kitchen. She washes her face, ponytails her hair to hide the grease, swallows some painkillers, and goes back to her room to find some clean clothes.

On her way out the door, she pauses and looks back inside. Zitao’s curled up like she’s cold, so Junmyeon goes back to the linen closet to dig out two spare blankets. 

When she returns to the living room to cover Zitao with the blankets, she finds Zitao sitting up on the couch and watching her with bleary, unhappy eyes.

“You’re awake,” Junmyeon observes.

Zitao nods, “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“I-,” Zitao starts, then pauses. She frowns. “I’m breaking up with you.”

Junmyeon’s heart plummets to her feet. “What? Why?”

She’d been expecting Zitao to address her recent silence after finding out about Zitao’s...extracurricular activities, not a breakup. 

Sighing, Zitao looks down at her own hands instead of Junmyeon. “You’re not safe, dating me. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that you were attacked by a demon last night.”

Thinking back to Yunho buying her a drink at the bar, Junmyeon suspects that Zitao is right. It’s still possible that she was a random target, though. She says as much.

“Even if he wasn’t after you because you’re dating me, others might be,” Zitao says. “I don’t want to put you in harm’s way.”

Junmyeon was not prepared for this situation at all, especially not right before work after a hell of a night. She feels cheated out of the time to sort out her own feelings. 

“Don’t I get any say in this?” Junmyeon asks. “Maybe I don’t care about the risks. I like you, Zitao.”

She’s lying about not caring about the risks. Last night was terrifying. But she thinks she deserves to figure out how she feels for herself.

Zitao looks up at her briefly, then away. “It’s not just about that, Unnie. What I did last night was stupid. I was so panicked when I saw that demon with you that I killed him right there on the street, where someone could have seen me. I’m no use to anyone if I get myself arrested for stabbing people on the street. So I can’t afford to have that kind of distraction.”

As much as she wants to argue, Junmyeon can’t think of anything to say. She’s a distraction. She certainly doesn’t want Zitao to be arrested. Assuming she didn’t hallucinate all of the night before, demons are very real and very scary. That means that not only is Zitao not crazy, she’s also very necessary for Seoul’s safety. 

Junmyeon looks at the clock. Any more time, and she won’t even be able to buy coffee on her way to work without being late to another day of being shunned by everyone in the clinic other than Jongin and her patients. Even now, she’s risking it. 

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be a distraction,” she says bitterly, feeling unfairly treated by the world at large. Zitao cringes. This is the temper that gets Junmyeon in trouble all the time, she knows, but she’s too frustrated at the moment to care. “I have to go to work.”

With that, she’s out the door. She speed-walks down the street in a daze and nearly walks right past the coffee shop. 

When she gets to work, Jongin takes one look at her face and asks what’s wrong. 

“Zitao broke up with me,” Junmyeon says. It comes out louder than she expected, and she notices some of the other staff turning to stare at her. Resisting the urge to shout at them, she puts her coffee down and ducks into a supply room.

Closing her eyes, she sucks air in through her nose, focusing on using her diaphragm instead of her chest, holds the breath to a count of three, then lets it out. After a moment, she repeats the inhale-hold-exhale pattern, then again when the second cycle hasn’t quite chased away the stressful thoughts.

Two minutes later, a calmer Junmyeon leaves the supply room ready to face the day, only to find herself face-to-face with Director Park.

“Director Park! What a surprise,” she says, forcing a smile onto her face even as she panics again inwardly. Why is Director Park here? Did her colleagues tell him she’s been running behind with appointments lately? She wouldn’t put it past them, with the way they’ve been acting.

“Good morning, Dr. Kim,” Director Park says, all courteous smiles. “Don’t worry, I’m just visiting to see how things are going.”

“Oh,” Junmyeon gives him her polite Dr. Kim smile. “Well, I hope you find that they’re going well.”

Leaning close to her, Director Park lowers his voice to ask, “I hope your coworkers haven’t given you any trouble since the year-end party?”

“Oh,” Junmyeon says. _Lots_ , she thinks, but she’s not dumb enough to say it. Seeking assistance from higher up will only make the bullying worse. “No, everything’s been fine.”

“I see,” Director Park says. “I’m glad to hear it. How’s your pretty girlfriend doing?”

Letting the smile drift from her face only a little bit, like she’s not thrilled but not anywhere near as hurt as she feels, Junmyeon tells him, “We broke up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Director Park’s eyebrows furrow like a television news anchor putting on a show of sadness in the face of a tragedy they don’t really feel. It strikes Junmyeon as excessive—she hardly knows the man, and her supposed dating history with Zitao wasn’t long enough to warrant such concern.

“Thank you,” Junmyeon says, for lack of anything better coming to mind. Thankfully, Jongin comes to her rescue by dropping by to say that their first patient is early, and would Dr. Kim be interested in seeing her now?

Junmyeon accepts gratefully and tries her best not to walk too quickly away from Director Park, lest it become obvious that she’s running away from him.

 

 

The last patient is out ten minutes before five o’clock, and for once Junmyeon isn’t excited. Talking to patients left little room for thinking about other things, so Junmyeon had been able to avoid thinking about her Zitao problem almost all day. As she gathers up her things to leave, all the thoughts she’d been avoiding start to filter back into her head. 

Trudging home, Junmyeon tries to remember if Sehun was scheduled to work tonight, or if maybe they can snuggle on the couch and marathon something together. She’s almost halfway to their apartment before she realizes that Sehun is just as likely to be consoling Zitao as Junmyeon, or that she might have a date with Minseok.

Sure enough, the apartment is dark when Junmyeon opens the door. 

Grabbing a beer, she flops on the couch and decides that a Sailor Moon marathon is in order. She texts Jongdae to come over, but she’s rejected in less than a minute with, _sorry date with kyungsoo ^^._

It stings. It shouldn’t sting—she knows that Jongdae would skip out on her date if she knew that Junmyeon had almost died and been dumped in the space of twelve hours, but she’s annoyed that Jongdae had brushed her off so easily. She’s a petty bitch, and she knows it. Maybe everyone’s avoiding her because she’s so petty. 

She shuts off her phone so that she won’t know who’s not contacting her and drops it on the coffee table, then shuts off her brain, too, and turns on the first episode of _Sailor Moon._

 

 

By midday Sunday, the only live human being Junmyeon has seen is the chicken delivery man. She’s seen him twice, and she was horribly embarrassed when it was the same guy the second time around. To make matters worse, she was wearing the same house clothes and watching Sailor Moon both times. 

She’s gone through all of the first season and made significant headway in _R_ by the time Sehun gets home in the early afternoon. The sound of the door opening breaks through Junmyeon’s petulant train of thought about how she could have called Zitao her Sailor Jupiter, and Sehun shuffles into the room.

“Hello, stranger,” Junmyeon says. It comes out sounding bitter, and she doesn’t care. She is bitter. 

Sehun says nothing for a moment, just lets her eyes trace over Junmyeon and her carton of chicken and the small mess Junmyeon has managed to restore to the apartment since Zitao’s strange pre-breakup cleaning rampage. 

“I see you had a productive weekend,” Sehun comments eventually. 

“Well, it’s not every day I almost get killed and then get dumped for being almost killed,” Junmyeon points out. She doesn’t comment about Sehun’s absence after all of these events, but Sehun knows her well enough to read between the lines. 

“Are you seriously angry that I wasn’t here?” She asks. “You were hardly that invested in Tao. It’s bad enough I had to spend half the weekend consoling her over her self-imposed misery.”

There goes Zitao’s excuse about wanting to protect Junmyeon. Shouldn’t she be just as concerned about Sehun? 

“So you’ll console her, but not me?” Junmyeon is stung, even though she knows she sounds selfish. “Did you miss the part where I _almost died_?”

“Since when do you want consoling?” Sehun says. “You never even tell me when something’s wrong!”

“That’s not true,” Junmyeon says, unsure where this is coming from. 

“It’s not? Then why did I have to hear from _Jongin_ that you’re being bullied at work?” 

Junmyeon opens her mouth—to say what, she doesn’t know—but Sehun cuts her off.

“No, Unnie. Don’t lie to me about how you didn’t want to bother me, or that it’s not that bad. That’s what you always say.

“But you know what the truth is? You have to be in charge, all the time. You’re always consoling me or ‘protecting’ me from something, but you never let me return the favor. I used to think that was nice, but I’m starting to think it’s just because you think you’re superior to me, somehow. You treat me like a baby, Unnie, but I’m not.”

“Sehun, what?” Junmyeon trails after Sehun as she storms into her room and watches blankly as she stuffs clothes into a bag. She needs to say something, she knows, but she’s too blindsided by all of this. 

She’s known for a while now that Sehun finds her patronizing at times, but she had no idea that it was this much of an issue. All she can do is watch wordlessly as Sehun closes the bag and walks back to the door. 

“I’m staying with Minseok for a few days,” she says. The door slams behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always loved!


	6. Chapter 5

"I'm impressed that you convinced Sehun to let go of you for a few hours," Junmyeon comments.

Minseok sits across the table from her at a quiet Italian restaurant. "She and Tao are having 'girls’ night.’ They say girlfriends don’t count as ‘girls’ for girls’ night, but I'm pretty sure they just wanted to play League of Legends without my sorry ass."

"That's about how it usually goes, from what I've seen," Junmyeon agrees with a forced laugh. It’s usually her role to feel left out of girls’ night, and it’s hard not to feel like she’s been usurped when she hasn’t seen Sehun in over a week. "I've never been invited."

"I knew it," Minseok pouts. Minseok's pouts are almost horrifically adorable. If anyone were to successfully usurp Junmyeon’s position, it would be someone like Minseok. "But I'm glad for the chance to talk to you one on one."

"What did you want to talk about?" Minseok had contacted Junmyeon out of the blue to ask if they could meet over dinner, without saying what for. Junmyeon has her guesses, as there's been a common theme to one-on-one meetings with Junmyeon called by Sehun's past girlfriends, but she finds that she can learn a lot about their character by how they broach the subject.

Minseok looks straight at Junmyeon, but she softens the look with a smile as she talks. "It's something I've already heard about from Sehun, but I wanted to get your side of the story. How would you describe your feelings toward Sehun?"

The pattern remains unbroken. At least Minseok doesn’t seem the type to scream or throw things at her. Junmyeon takes a sip of her wine while she thinks about how to phrase her response. She’s never figured out how to navigate this situation successfully.

"Has she told you how we met?" She asks, finally.

"She said you'd been friends since she was in her first year of middle school?"

Junmyeon nods and launches into the story from her perspective.

Years later, she still remembers sitting on a train during her first week of high school, watching a kid from her neighborhood in her own school's middle school uniform hover awkwardly on the edge of a group of similarly-dressed, chatting boys. She knew Oh Sehun, of course, but they'd never been close—she'd heard from her mother, who’d in turn heard from Sehun’s mother, that Sehun would be attending her school starting that spring.

Something about Sehun had caught Junmyeon's eye that day. She'd seemed detached, like she didn't quite fit with the people she was with. 

In hindsight, it was probably shyness combined with the awkwardness of the first week at a new school, when everyone was trying to find a clique. At the time, though, Junmyeon had entertained the hope that Sehun felt odd in the same way she did. 

She herself felt disengaged from her own friends more and more often, even though she liked them all well enough. At fifteen, she was starting to realize she wasn't quite the same as the girls around her, even if she wasn't quite sure why. She was smart, popular, and clearly Going Places in life like her parents wanted, but she didn't get boy crazy the way the other girls did. It left her forced to pretend to agree with them when they talked about boys, which they did frequently.

At fifteen, of course, she’d largely believed her mother’s scoffing that the boy crazy girls were just vapid, and that Junmyeon was right to focus more on her studies than boys. It would take a few more years for her to connect that her lack of interest in boys was a mark of being a lesbian rather than the mark of maturity all of the adults around her took it for, that the way she felt about some of her female friends was how she was supposed to feel about boys.

She's still not sure how they managed to get along so well, given that Sehun has always been her opposite in so many ways. Sehun was introverted, where Junmyeon has always been gregarious, and she spent most of her time playing video games, which have never been Junmyeon's cup of tea. All they could bond over were standard anime like Sailor Moon and Pokemon and super heroes.

But one day she'd run to catch up with the already tall Sehun as they both got off the train, leaving behind the remnants of their respective cliques destined for farther stops, and asked if they could walk together.

Sehun had given her a funny look but nodded, and Junmyeon had spent the whole walk home asking questions to get to know Sehun. 

“How are you liking the school?” She’d asked.

“It’s okay.” Sehun had replied.

“Are you making friends okay?”

“I guess.”

“Got any favorite teachers yet?”

“Not really.”

“Awful ones?”

“No.”

“Favorite subjects?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have any hobbies?” Junmyeon asked, then held up a finger when Sehun opened her mouth to reply. “Aside from answering people’s questions in two words or less, I mean.”

With a sidelong glance at Junmyeon and a small smirk, Sehun’s response was, “Video games.”

“I see.” Junmyeon began racking her brain for a question that couldn’t be answered in two words. “What are your three favorite foods?”

A pout. “Bubble tea.”

“That’s only one,” Junmyeon play-scolded.

“It’s my only favorite food.”

“Ha, I win!” Junmyeon crowed. She hadn’t been able to get another word out of Sehun the rest of the way home that day, just a determined pout, but the next day she’d tagged along with Junmyeon on the way home from the train station, anyway.

 

“This is nice and all,” Minseok interjects gently. “But I’m not sure I get where you’re going with it.”

Junmyeon grimaces. She’d gotten sidetracked by the story and forgotten the point of it. “Sehun is like a safe place to me, I guess? We were both odd people out in school. She’s one of the first friends I was able to let my guard down around, when I was getting more and more guarded around my other friends.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m in love with her. It’s all platonic,” Junmyeon finishes lamely. 

Throughout her whole spiel, Minseok has been watching her with a steady, even gaze. Now she takes a sip of her drink before speaking. “So she’s kind of like a giant security blanket?” 

That fills Junmyeon’s head with an image of Sehun wrapped around her like a blanket, and she snorts. It’s not far from how Sehun acts, some days.

“I guess you could say that.”

“Then does it bother you that she’s been spending so much time with me, lately?” Minseok asks. “You’ve been without your security blanket a lot.”

“No. I don’t get jealous about her relationships. She’s always been good about making time for me,” Junmyeon says. “When we’re not fighting, that is.”

It’s a half-truth. She’s jealous that she hasn’t heard from Sehun in a week, but the rational side of her knows that’s because Sehun is angry with her, not because Sehun has found a better unnie to hang around. The emotional side of her can take its jealousy and shove it up its ass.

Minseok gives her a wry smile. “Is the fighting a frequent occurrence?”

“No, but we’re both stubborn enough that it takes a while to sort things out when we do.”

Soon enough, Junmyeon will apologize for treating Sehun like a kid, and Sehun will apologize for neglecting Junmyeon when she was unhappy. Then Junmyeon will do her best not to baby Sehun, and Sehun will just go back to being her usual self, because she doesn’t normally neglect Junmyeon at all. 

“So you’ve seen Tao?” Junmyeon can’t resist asking.

Minseok nods cautiously.

“Is she doing okay?”

“She’s stressed, but she’s doing okay,” Minseok sighs. “All things considered, anyway.”

Pursing her lips, Junmyeon nods. “Thanks.”

There’s a moment of silence, then. Junmyeon takes a bite of her carbonara and chews slowly, watching Minseok watch her. She contemplates making a big deal about missing Zitao to assuage Minseok’s suspicions about her relationship with Sehun, but it would be fake when the truth is that she’s still angry and hurt. 

“Speaking of Tao, you haven’t run into any more demons, have you?” Minseok asks.

“Would I be alive if I had?” 

Junmyeon can’t help the bitter response. She’s been wary of strangers and jumping at shadows all week, certain she wouldn’t be able to escape another demon attack. Yunho’s hypnosis was too perfect.

With a grimace, Minseok looks down at her fork as she twists it around and around in her pasta until she has a bite ready. She puts it in her mouth and chews slowly.

“It’s possible, although you probably wouldn’t be aware that you’d met a demon,” Minseok says after she’s swallowed. “I’ve just been thinking, and I’m not sure I agree with Tao’s logic about why you were attacked.”

“How so?” Junmyeon cocks her head.

“Tao thinks the demon might have been attacking you to scare her, but I’m not so sure. Demons don’t usually go out of their way to antagonize hunters, because it draws attention to them. There aren’t many of them, and there are enough hunters that it’s in a demon’s best interests to lie low.”

“Could that have changed if the numbers have changed?” Junmyeon asks, remembering something about Zitao being summoned to deal with an outbreak. 

Pursing her lips, Minseok nods. “It’s possible. It could also be coincidence that the demon attacked you. I think it’s more likely that getting rid of you was an act of self-defense.”

“Why would a demon need to protect himself from me?” Junmyeon scowls.

“Not you, but the threat of discovery if Tao started appearing at all of your work functions, or dropping by at your job. Hospitals are a convenient place for a demon to spend its time, since deaths in hospitals don’t often lead to criminal investigations.”

The world is spinning, Junmyeon is pretty sure. She puts her fork down slowly, because her hand suddenly feels like it’s made of lead. “But I work in a clinic. All the deaths happen in the hospital.”

“Does anyone on the clinic’s staff work at both?” Minseok asks.

Already going through her coworkers in her head, Junmyeon nods. The nicer Dr. Lee and Dr. Choi both work part-time in the hospital and part-time in the clinic, and a couple of the nurses have a similar arrangement. 

Maybe the bullying wasn’t over her sexual orientation, she realizes. Maybe someone just wanted to get her, and the threat of her girlfriend, away from the hospital system. She freezes halfway through getting a forkful of carbonara to explain the situation to Minseok.

“You need to get out of there, Junmyeon,” Minseok says.

 

The evening after her chat with Minseok, Junmyeon hears the lock on the front door open. She's lying in bed, staring at the ceiling as her mind runs around in circles, worrying about demons and Sehun and Zitao and demons and her career. It's all very frustrating and overwhelming, and so she elects not to get up to see who's come in, knowing that she's not in a state for confrontation.

The edges of her door light up with light from the hall, and she listens to the human noises of someone else brushing her teeth and drinking water. The silence has been deafening in the past week, and Junmyeon has hated it.

Eventually, the thump of footsteps nears her room, and the light in the hall switches off. She considers pretending to be asleep when there's a light tap on her bedroom door, and a tentative, "Unnie?"

But she knows that would be selfish, and Sehun doesn't deserve to be subjected to Junmyeon's selfishness over and over.

"You can come in," she says, still too apathetic to get out of bed.

The door opens, and Sehun slips in quietly, shuffling along comically in the dark as her night vision has been destroyed by the lights. Junmyeon can only see her silhouette as she reaches in front of herself to grope for the bed, onto which she promptly climbs.

Soon enough, skinny, fumbling arms are wrapping around Junmyeon, pulling her in close. Sehun is comfortingly familiar around her and warm.

"I'm sorry, Unnie," Sehun whispers.

Junmyeon means to apologize in response, but the breath she pulls in to speak catches on the beginning trembles of a sob. She clings to Sehun as she tries to catch her breath through the wave that follows as her whole body convulses with the tears she hasn't shed all week. It takes two separate breaths to squeeze out an, "I'm sorry," and that's all she can manage.

There's so much more she wants to say, about how she's been a jerk, and about how much she loves Sehun, and how worried she's been, but thinking about it just makes the sobs come harder.

"I know," Sehun says, shushing her when she tries to speak again. "You can tell me in the morning."

Sehun stays wrapped around Junmyeon as she cries, and she’s still there when Junmyeon wakes up in the morning. The weight of her eyelids tells her that they’re horribly puffy, and she has a headache. Neither of those things is enough of an irritation to prompt her to leave the warm, safe weight of Sehun’s limbs, so she stays put until Sehun wakes up.

Over breakfast, she apologizes for keeping things from Sehun, and Sehun apologizes for leaving her alone when she needed support. 

Then Sehun makes fun of Junmyeon’s puffy eyes by suggesting a new career at the zoo as a panda, and Junmyeon throws a piece of toast at her, and things are back to normal. Except where they aren’t.

Sighing, Junmyeon looks down at her toast. 

“What’s wrong?” Sehun asks. 

It’s not in Junmyeon’s nature to dump her worries on her friends, but she figures it’s worth a try if she’s just been in trouble with Sehun for keeping her worries to herself. Hesitantly, she starts to explain the work bullying and Minseok’s concern about her colleagues.

She half expects Sehun to be irritated about the Minseok part, since prior experience tells her that Sehun’s girlfriends don’t usually warn her before interrogating her best friend, but not even a speck of surprise crosses Sehun’s face. 

“So I’m wondering if I should get a new job,” Junmyeon finishes. 

Sehun purses her lips, making her face look even more pinched than it normally does. “That would be best.”

“But where?” Junmyeon asks. “How do I know if a new workplace will be any safer than the one I’ve got now?”

“Minseok said her ex’s clinic is hiring,” Sehun suggests. “Any demon would have to be an idiot to work there.”

It’s not the first Junmyeon has heard of the option; Minseok had mentioned it at their dinner. Still, she isn’t sure that working with demon hunters would be any better than worrying about demon colleagues. It certainly doesn’t fit the bill for the safe, normal kind of job in a safe, normal kind of life that Junmyeon wants. She says as much.

Sehun sighs. “Can you really keep clinging to your old idea of a ‘normal’ world after meeting a demon?”

“You know what I mean,” Junmyeon says. A steady job, a wife she gets to see every day, friends she can also see frequently, and a daily date with her bed for several hours are all she really wants. She’d left Chanyeol largely because she couldn’t see that kind of life ever happening with her, so is it fair to change her mind now?

Sehun gives her a pointed look. “People change as they grow, Unnie. You don’t owe it to your exes to stay the same forever.” 

 

Minseok’s warning still lingers in Junmyeon’s mind as she walks into the clinic on Monday morning. There’s not much she can do, at the moment, since she can’t walk away from her job with no notice. News of her breakup with Zitao has most likely made it down the grapevine by now at least, so any demonic colleagues will hopefully feel less pressure to get rid of Junmyeon. 

The first person she comes across is Nurse Choi, who glances around as if to make sure there are no witnesses before nodding her head in a quick greeting. Junmyeon gives the same nod in response, but the nurse scuttles off before she can squeeze in a “good morning.”

If Nurse Choi is one of the ones who tries to greet Junmyeon, does that mean she’s not the demon?

Sighing, Junmyeon settles into her office and opens her schedule for the day. She’d given Minseok a list of people who worked in both the clinic and the hospital, and all she can do now is leave it up to Zitao and Minseok to investigate. According to Minseok, there’s no way to tell a demon is a demon when it’s in human form other than to catch it in the act of eating a soul.

Still, she can’t help but run through the characteristics Minseok told her were common in a demon and compare them to her colleagues. The nicer Dr. Lee fits the bill the closest—a handsome man of indeterminate age who never seems to discuss his personal life. As far as Junmyeon knows, he’s single and could be anywhere between the ages of thirty and fifty.

Nurse Kim—Junsu, not Jongin—is also suspect, although he looks quite young. It’s possible that Junmyeon just doesn’t like him, though, given that she doesn’t have any reason to suspect him other than his work at the hospital and love of bars. He’s always polite, and he’s not particularly reserved. 

With another sigh, Junmyeon shakes her head and tries to focus on her schedule. She’s relieved to see that only one appointment slot is open, meaning she’ll have very little time to dwell on things she can’t do anything about. 

Before she goes to her first appointment, she texts Minseok the link to her clinic’s online profiles of its physicians, complete with pictures, hoping that it’ll help in their search. It’s a shame that the nurses’ profiles aren’t online, she thinks.

Jongin pops her head in the door just as she finishes, and she’s lead off to treat today’s round of what she hopes will only be comfortingly minor problems. Warts, sniffles, and rashes are easier to handle than breakups, bullies, and soul-eating demons.

The problems do turn out to be largely minor, but that turns into a bit of a problem in itself, because they don’t require enough time or brain power to keep Junmyeon distracted. Throughout the day, in gaps between appointments or moments when she’s waiting for a child to calm down enough for an exam, her mind keeps returning to Sehun’s suggestion, and the pros and cons of it. 

She wonders if she’d ever feel safe again, being doctor to demon hunters. But will she ever feel safe again, period? She was attacked while doing something she does all the time. There’s no telling when it might happen again. 

Halfway through the afternoon, she gets a text from Baekhyun inviting her to a get-together, with a warning that Chanyeol will be there, and her concentration only goes downhill from there.

By the time she gets home, her mind is still spinning. She’s pleasantly surprised to find Sehun on the couch.

Dropping herself onto the cushions beside Sehun, she asks two of the little things that have bugged her all day.

“Would Tao be okay with me working at Lu Han’s clinic? And how come I’m a distraction to her, but she hasn’t started avoiding you for the same reason?”

“Tao would worry, but Tao is worried anyway,” Sehun says. “And it wouldn’t be fair to the other hunters to prevent them from having enough doctors to go around just because you’re a distraction to her.”

There’s a pause, but it’s clear from the way Sehun is chewing her lip that she has more to say. Junmyeon keeps quiet.

“And as for your other question,” Sehun continues eventually. “She’s not avoiding me because I won’t let her avoid me.”

She’s not glaring, but the comment is pointed. Junmyeon knows that she didn’t actually try that hard, and she doesn’t know if she wants to rectify it. She ought to know by now, she thinks. 

Then again, threat of death by demons is an unusual level of danger for a relationship to pose. Maybe she deserves extra time to be indecisive.

With a sigh, she texts Minseok to ask about Lu Han’s clinic’s job opening. The best way to get rid of a mountain of problems is to deal with them one at a time, and her job is the most pressing problem in the current mountain. She can worry about her relationship with Tao once she’s not worried about being bullied or attacked by demons at work.

 

 

Minseok responds several hours later that Lu Han is interested, and that she’s going to be at Baekhyun’s gathering and would like to meet there. And so Junmyeon finds herself sitting in a waiting room for karaoke on Friday night despite her reservations about the event, simultaneously cursing and thanking the way being part of the LGBT community can make even a big city feel like a small town. She wonders how Lu Han and Baekhyun know each other. 

It’s the latest she’s been out in weeks, and the closest she’s been to being in a bar at all since she was attacked. Trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible, she sits tucked into a corner on the waiting room bench where the wall juts out to accommodate the stairwell on the other side. There’s a man standing at the bar who keeps glancing in their direction as she chats with Jongdae and Minseok, and it’s making her nervous. She scoots closer to the wall and hopes that the rest of their party will arrive quickly.

“Are you okay?” Minseok asks, glancing at Junmyeon’s hand with furrowed eyebrows. Realizing that she’s got a death grip on her drink, Junmyeon forces herself to relax and smiles at Minseok. 

“I’m fine.”

Jongdae looks back and forth between them quizzically for a moment. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m just a little jumpy after what happened two weeks ago,” Junmyeon explains. “And that guy keeps looking at us.”

All she’s told Jongdae is that the man from the bar stalked and briefly assaulted her, not that he was a demon or that she nearly died. Even so, Jongdae’s eyebrows draw together in concern, and she scoots closer to Junmyeon to take her hand. Junmyeon gives Jongdae’s hand a grateful squeeze and smiles.

One of Park Chanyeol’s most distinctive features has always been her deep, loud voice. Because she’s almost always talking, it tends to precede her, like smoke before a fire. Today is no different, and Junmyeon can hear Chanyeol and Baekhyun laughing raucously for several minutes in the stairwell before they walk through the door. It gives her time to brace herself.

Chanyeol could be a projection from Junmyeon’s memories, she’s changed so little since they were dating. Her hair is still black, pulled into its usual messy ponytail—she always fiddles with it while she works, so it ends up half pulled out of its tie in messy clumps—and her lanky frame is covered in a hoody so enormous that only the tips of her fingers protrude from her sleeves. On one side, they’re wrapped up in Baekhyun’s much smaller hand.

Next to her, Baekhyun looks small and put-together in skinny jeans, heels, and a low-cut blouse. Her makeup and jewelry are both heavy, and her hair is smooth, and if it weren’t for their matching loud voices and grins, Junmyeon would think they were a horribly mismatched couple.

Chanyeol and Junmyeon had been even more mismatched.

The grin on Chanyeol’s face doesn’t dampen when she catches sight of Junmyeon, but it also doesn’t get bigger. She nods. 

“Hi, Junmyeon.”

“Hi, Chanyeol,” Junmyeon responds. 

She doesn’t know what else to say. The image of Baekhyun’s fingers wrapped around Chanyeol’s is burned onto the backs of her eyelids, and the heartbreak that had been interrupted in the chaos of nearly dying and being dumped and fighting with Sehun finally finishes sending its little cracks through Junmyeon’s heart. 

For the first time, Junmyeon believes it will be the last time. She doesn’t want to cry or throw things or leave; it’s just a little snap and a lonely feeling. The word ‘closure’ floats up into her head and settles there.

Two more people walk through the door, and Baekhyun calls out to them. “Lu Han, Yixing!”

The two women turn toward them. They’re both of average height and both impossibly pretty in different ways. The one with more pronounced curves smiles as soon as she sees Baekhyun, and Junmyeon has heard enough from Baekhyun about her dimple that she doesn’t need an introduction to know that this is Yixing.

That means the thinner, doll-like woman is Lu Han. Junmyeon can’t help but check Minseok’s reaction to seeing her, looking for signs of trouble, but Minseok is just smiling the way she always does when she greets people.

Brief introductions are made, and then they’re led to their room by a waiter who has trouble keeping his eyes off Junmyeon and Yixing’s breasts.

Junmyeon sits on one of the chairs at the side of the room, and Jongdae takes the one next to her. Lu Han and Minseok take the end of the bench near their chairs, while Yixing piles into a heap with Baekhyun and Chanyeol on the other end. 

Menus and song catalogs are passed around. Junmyeon sifts slowly through the list, trying to find a song she knows that would be appropriate for tonight. Twice’s _TT_ might come off as a jab at Chanyeol; she loves _Cheer Up,_ but singing it would be a sure way to get Jongdae up on a soapbox about the lyrics; and SNSD’s _Lion Heart_ is out for the same reason as _TT_.

Eventually, she settles on Red Velvet’s _Russian Roulette,_ figuring that the lyrics are safe enough from any connection to Chanyeol. She keys it into the machine, then sets it down to listen to Minseok singing a song she doesn’t know.

Lu Han waits until Jongdae has gotten up to sing to turn to Junmyeon. “Minseok says you’re a doctor?”

Nodding slowly, Junmyeon says, “I’m a pediatrician. I hope we didn’t cause any trouble at your clinic a few weeks ago.”

Lu Han smiles and waves a hand to dismiss the notion. “Nobody would have known you were ever there, if Minseok and Tao hadn’t told me. I’m just glad there was someone around to help.”

They make idle chatter about medical school until Jongdae starts hitting high notes that Junmyeon decides require applause and cheers. Lu Han hollers right along with her.

As Jongdae’s song selection fades out, the opening of _Cheer Up_ starts playing. Junmyeon cheers as Lu Han gets up to sing and pointedly ignores Jongdae’s exasperated roll of the eyes. Her hands move up to her cheeks of their own accord to do the “shy shy shy” gesture when Lu Han gets there, along with Yixing and Minseok, and soon the three of them are getting up to back dance for Lu Han. Yixing and Minseok are much better than Junmyeon, but they just laugh when she gets bits wrong and runs into them. Then Baekhyun joins in, every bit as awful as Junmyeon, and Junmyeon thinks Chanyeol and Jongdae are going to die of laughter.

Lu Han returns the favor when _Russian Roulette_ comes on next, and Jongdae joins in, grabbing a microphone add in backing vocals that are hardly any softer than Junmyeon’s singing.

The front desk calls to tell them their time is up far too soon for Junmyeon’s liking, even though her cheeks are aching from all the laughter. As she picks up her jacket, she realizes it’s been ages since she’s felt so relaxed around other people. Not even Chanyeol’s presence lowers her mood; they’ve only said a few words to each other all night, and Junmyeon has hardly noticed because the other women there are just that entertaining.

She leaves with Lu Han’s contact information in her phone, piling into a taxi with Jongdae and Minseok. When the driver pulls away from the curb, Jongdae twines her arms around Junmyeon’s shoulders and sighs happily. “That went so much better than I expected!”

“What were you expecting?” Junmyeon asks. She’s not sure she wants to know. Minseok is looking at them quizzically, and Junmyeon wonders if they forgot to tell her about Junmyeon’s history with Chanyeol. For her part, Minseok hadn’t seemed anything other than friendly with Lu Han.

“Tears,” Jongdae says. “Or another dramatic early exit.”

Junmyeon rolls her eyes. “It’s been _years_ , Jongdae. I’m over it.”

“I’m glad,” Jongdae responds. Thankfully, she leaves it there.


	7. Chapter 6

“Ground rules,” Lu Han says. “Number one: obviously don’t go talking to anyone about demons if you don’t already know they know about the demons. That includes some of our staff, and almost all of our patients.”

That makes sense. Junmyeon nods along from her seat in one of the visitor chairs in a patient exam room at Lu Han’s clinic. Doctor Wu Yifan, a super tall doctor to whom Junmyeon has only just been introduced, stands with her hip propped on the patient bed. She could be a model. 

All the other staff have gone home for the day, so it’s time for the weird end to Junmyeon’s weirdly normal interview at what is, all things considered, a weirdly normal clinic. The patients are normal, run of the mill patients, with normal, run of the mill complaints. The most unusual thing about the clinic so far is the high proportion of Chinese patients, which is almost definitely due to the presence of several Chinese-speaking doctors. 

Gesturing at Dr. Wu, Lu Han continues, “Practically speaking, at the clinic it’s me and Yifan here who know about the demons, plus Yixing, who’s a nurse when she’s not hunting demons. There was an older doctor, but he retired early last year. Most of the hunter injuries we need to treat happen outside of normal clinic hours, but in the case that they do happen while we’re open, have Yixing run interference with the other staff as much as possible. We don’t need them wondering why we’ve got friends coming in for treatment of injuries they appear to have gotten in fights.”

Junmyeon nods again. “What if I need x-rays?”

“Good question,” Lu Han says. She leafs through some papers on the table until she finds one with a list of names and numbers, which she hands to Junmyeon. “We’ve got numbers you can call for various labs listed here. They’re mostly people who are aware of demons one way or another, but they’re not always going to be available to help.

“Which is part of the reason for the second rule, which is that any injuries that are more than you can handle at the clinic go to the Gookil Hospital Emergency Room, and call Yifan on the way. Yifan has connections there.”

Across the room, Yifan nods. She smiles at Junmyeon’s worried look. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t happen very often!”

“How many demon hunters are there?” Junmyeon asks a question that’s been plaguing her.

“Not many,” Lu Han says, looking at Yifan. “We know of fifteen in Seoul? Twenty at most?”

“They’re not all part of any specific organization,” Yifan says. “Though there are some larger groups that we do know of, like your friend Tao’s. We don’t keep any record of their names to protect the hunters.”

“It’s not a huge time commitment,” Lu Han says. She waves her cell phone. “We’d work you in to be on call one or two nights a week, and then we usually alternate weekends. Most weeks we don’t have any hunters in need of assistance.”

“I see.”

“Any other questions?” Lu Han asks, one eyebrow quirked up like she knows exactly how many questions Junmyeon must have.

For her part, Junmyeon opens her mouth to ask but can’t land on anything specific, or at least nothing directly related to the job. Walking into a clinic to interview for a job fixing up demon hunters has brought the inescapability of her situation crashing down on Junmyeon, and as a result, she’s full of all of the questions she’s been keeping herself from thinking too hard on since Zitao first said soul-eating demons weren’t a joke.

“How did you two come to work here?” Is the first thing Junmyeon lands on that seems to be appropriate for the situation, so she asks it.

That gets her a snort from both Lu Han and Yifan.

“A cute girl named Minseok rescued me from a demon once,” Lu Han says. “I thought if I worked here, I’d get to see her more often, so I convinced them to let me do a residency. We broke up a while ago, but they still needed me here. I didn’t mind staying.”

There isn’t a hint of surprise on Yifan’s face at the mention of Lu Han’s relationship. Junmyeon finds it a relief after her last experience with coming out in the workplace, but she makes a mental note to ask Lu Han if she has any lingering feelings for Minseok. 

Then she crosses out that mental note, because Sehun would be upset. Kim Junmyeon’s nose can stay in Kim Junmyeon’s own business.

“My uncle founded this clinic,” Yifan says, providing her own answer to Junmyeon’s question. “I’d always planned to work here after my residency. I didn’t know about the demons part until after I started. My uncle was also the first person to treat hunters here.”

_Have you ever regretted working here?_ Junmyeon wants to ask, but she can’t expect a straight answer from either doctor if she asks them in front of each other. 

 

 

“I’m glad I’m a doctor,” Junmyeon tells Lu Han’s cat the following night. Lu Han had invited her over for drinks and questions when it was clear that Junmyeon had a lot of questions about demons, and not just related to the job. It’s somehow much easier to ask Lu Han than Minseok about these things, maybe because Lu Han’s story has similarities to Junmyeon’s own.

The cat rolls onto her back on the couch cushions and bumps her head against Junmyeon’s hand to demand more pets. Clearly, she doesn’t care about Junmyeon’s problems.

“Why’s that?” Lu Han asks. 

“It’s gotten me used to getting uncertain answers to questions,” Junmyeon elaborates.

So far tonight, she’s gotten far fewer answers than she’s asked questions. Where do the demons come from? _We don’t really know. They’ve been around for centuries, at least._ How do we know it’s really souls they’re eating? _We don’t. We just know that brain death happens very quickly after an attack, unless the attacking demon is killed within a few minutes._ How many are there? _Nobody knows. They’ve been found worldwide, but they’re good at blending in._

Lu Han laughs ruefully and shakes her head. “It’s true. It’s just like medicine, in that we don’t know as much as we want to know.”

“It’s scary, isn’t it?” Yifan asks. She’s draped over Lu Han’s armchair, cradling a ginger ale because she’s on call tonight. Surely one beer would be okay, Junmyeon thinks, but Yifan comes across as the nervous type. “I mean, statistically speaking, you’re still more likely to die from cancer, but for some reason the demons are scarier.”

“It’s that helplessness,” Lu Han says, visibly shuddering. “In hindsight, you really should have known you were being attacked, but there was nothing you could do at the time.”

Nodding, Junmyeon takes a sip of her beer and wishes it were stronger. “Does the memento trick work?”

Minseok had told her to wear something uncomfortable—a cheap ring with sharp edges or a choker with rough embellishments—if she was planning to go out alone, and to focus on it if any strangers approached. The discomfort would keep enough of her brain engaged on something other than the demon’s hypnosis to catch on that something was wrong, the theory went. 

“I’ve never tried it,” Lu Han says. “The hunters all swear by it, though.”

Fingering the sharp seam on the plastic mood ring she’s been carrying around faithfully since receiving Minseok’s advice, Junmyeon looks to Yifan, who shakes her head. “I’ve never had a chance to try it, either.” 

“But why do only these hunters have the ability to hunt demons?”

“Nobody knows,” Yifan says.

“Really,” Junmyeon says. “You guys are giving me that answer so much, I could make a drinking game out of it.”

“Okay,” Yifan says. “Tao’s organization has a story that the demons came about as the result of a curse following the destruction of a sacred forest a thousand years ago to create a palace for a local warlord’s mistress. The souls of the trees were permanently destroyed in the process, so the demons permanently destroy the souls of humans in response. The story holds that the hunters are all reincarnations of monks who worshipped the tree spirits, who were gifted the ability to protect themselves from the demons as a mark of the forest’s gratitude.”

“Meanwhile,” Lu Han says, “DW, the Christian organization that scouted Minseok, says that demons are evil creatures sent by the devil to kill sinners before they can repent, thereby securing their souls for the underworld. Hence their love of attacking women looking for one night stands.”

“It’s more of a cult than a Christian organization,” Yifan interjects.

Junmyeon sits up straight in alarm, nearly upending her beer in the process. “Should I be worried that one of its members is dating my honorary little sister?”

“Don’t worry,” Lu Han says. “Minseok thinks it’s all a load of crap. She started distancing herself from them long before she lost her powers.”

“Do you ever wonder if maybe they’re right, though? Maybe Minseok lost her powers because she acts on her homosexual urges,” Yifan suggests.

Before Junmyeon can think too hard on the implications of that, Lu Han throws a small stuffed cat toy at Yifan’s head. “Stop scaring the newbie. If there really is a god that was that bothered by Minseok’s homosexual activities, it took an awful lot of them for him to get around to taking away her powers.”

Yifan scowls, but the jingle of a cellphone ringtone interrupts her response. She digs the phone out of her pocket and answers it promptly.

The call is brief. The caller says something after Yifan’s greeting, and Yifan says, “Okay, I’m on my way. Be there in fifteen minutes.” Then she hangs up and stands up.

“Junmyeon, do you want to come with me?” She asks, stretching. “We were planning to have you come along on a couple calls to get a feel for the kinds of things we get. Might as well start now.”

Nodding, Junmyeon gets up on unsteady legs to follow her to the coat closet as Lu Han disappears to the kitchen.

“Take this,” she offers, returning with a bottle of water as Junmyeon buttons her coat. Junmyeon takes it gratefully and follows Yifan out the door.

With the drastic height difference, Junmyeon practically has to jog to keep up with Yifan as she speed-walks to the clinic. That prevents her from drinking her water on the way, so that she’s no less tipsy when they arrive than she was at Lu Han’s house. It shouldn’t matter much, since she doesn’t expect to be treating any injuries. Yifan is plenty sober.

It shouldn’t surprise Junmyeon when the tall figure sitting in the doorway to the clinic turns out to be Zitao on closer inspection. In hindsight, Junmyeon doesn’t know how much Lu Han knows about her relationship with Zitao, or how much she’s told Yifan.

For her part, Yifan doesn’t look at all shocked when she’s confronted by an angry Zitao. Junmyeon may not remember much from her year of Mandarin in college, but from the _ta_ and _weisheme_ she catches from Zitao’s question to Yifan, coupled with the finger she points at Junmyeon, she knows exactly what Zitao has just said.

“I needed a new job. They needed a new doctor,” Junmyeon says, in Korean. Zitao stares at her, flabbergasted, and says something else in Mandarin.

“If you’re asking why I didn’t tell you I speak Mandarin, it’s because I mostly don’t,” Junmyeon responds.

Ignoring them, Yifan brushes past Zitao to unlock the door. It’s only when she’s got the door open and Zitao is still staring at Junmyeon that she speaks. “Zitao, come in before you lose more blood. I know you don’t want Junmyeon to work here, but it’s her choice to make, not yours.”

Pouting, Zitao turns and follows Yifan into the clinic. She’s hunched over and limping to avoid putting any weight on her left leg. Junmyeon slips out her phone to text Sehun before she trails after them, asking if she’s able to get to the car.

“Just tell me there weren’t any bullets this time,” Yifan is saying when Junmyeon catches up with them.

“Bullets?” Junmyeon asks, as Zitao says, “No bullets.”

Yifan supports Zitao’s weight as she eases onto the examination table. “Unfortunately, demons don’t have any aversion to regular human weaponry. They don’t have an easy time getting their hands on guns in Korea, but it happens.”

“How recently did bullets happen?” Junmyeon asks.

Based on what she’s heard, Yifan wasn’t working for this clinic the last time Zitao was in Korea, which would imply this happened in the last few months, and probably since the last time they had sex.

“Last week,” Yifan says, when Zitao is silent. Zitao glares at her, and Yifan makes a sharp comment in Chinese. 

Lifting Zitao’s shirt, Yifan examines the wound on her abdomen before beckoning Junmyeon closer to look. It’s a clean knife cut.

“Not deep enough to get any internal organs, but it’ll need stitches. Let’s see the one on your leg, Tao.”

Thankfully, Zitao hadn’t chosen skinny jeans to wear on her demon hunting expedition. The hem of her sweatpants lifts easily enough to reveal a nasty gash on her calf, and Yifan sucks in a breath through her teeth.

“You’re gonna need to stay off of that,” she says.

Zitao pouts. “I can’t.”

“You can, and you will. Get one of the other hunters to help you, if you have to.”

There isn’t much for Junmyeon to do. The wounds aren’t desperate enough to warrant the risk of a less-than-sober doctor’s help, and she’s closed out of the bickering when it shifts into what Junmyeon presumes to be something other than Mandarin, because she doesn’t understand a word of it. She works on familiarizing herself with the locations of supplies, pulling them out for Yifan to use. 

While she goes through cabinets and opens sterile packages of disinfectant, sutures, and gauze—strangely mundane instruments for fixing up strangely mundane wounds caused by otherworldly monsters—Junmyeon wonders if Zitao’s wounds were inflicted by one of the people on the list she gave Minseok. The idea that one of the people she’s seen nearly every day for the past year can kill people in the way that the man from the bar had tried to kill her is still paralyzing.

“Do you have someone we can call to help you get home?” Yifan asks in Korean, after a long, sullen silence from Zitao.

Before Zitao can respond, Junmyeon jumps in. “I texted Sehun to bring the car. She said she will as soon as she’s home from work.”

Zitao nods and mumbles a thank you without meeting Junmyeon’s eyes.

 

Sehun arrives as Yifan is finishing with the stitches. She’s all over Zitao instantly, asking if she’s okay and what happened and why didn’t Tao call her.

“A demon spotted me before I spotted him,” Zitao says. “And Unnie told me she texted you.”

Frowning, Sehun leans down to examine the stitched-up gash on Zitao’s leg. “I hope that demon is dead.”

Zitao sighs. “He got away again.”

All too aware of Yifan’s need for everyone to leave so that she can lock up the clinic, Junmyeon tugs her coat on meaningfully. She carries Zitao’s coat over and drapes it over her shoulders, then rests a gentle hand on the back of her shoulder once she’s slipped her arms into the sleeves, offering support. Zitao leans on her to stand, saying nothing as Sehun continues to berate her. 

“How is a demon getting away from you? You kick ass, Tao,” Sehun says.

Junmyeon is more concerned about how a demon could be sneaking up on Zitao, but she stays mute. She’s not sure where they stand with each other, and she’s still a little angry with Zitao. The injury has only served to remind her how awful it is to be angry with someone who’s putting herself in harm’s way to protect Junmyeon. That makes her feel guilty for being angry, which in turn makes her angrier, because why should she have to feel guilty for being angry?

The orange blossom scent that’s settled around her along with Zitao calls up pleasant memories of cuddling and kissing her, too, and that makes her angry all over again because why did Zitao have to go and ruin everything by being some kind of superhero?

They make their way to the car after exchanging goodbyes and thank yous with Yifan. Junmyeon helps Zitao into the back seat, then makes her way around to climb into the other side rather than make Zitao slide across. Sehun is already opening that door to climb in when Junmyeon gets there, and she raises her eyebrows when Junmyeon redirects her to the driver’s seat.

“I had a few drinks earlier,” Junmyeon explains. She feels pretty sober, but there’s no need to risk it. 

When they’ve settled into the car, Sehun turns around to glare at the two of them. “Can you two be adults, or do I need to drop Junmyeon at home and take Tao to her place?”

“She should come to our place,” Junmyeon says, meekly accepting the lack of an “unnie” after her name. Zitao starts to protest, but she quickly gives up when Sehun turns the full force of the glare on her.

“Our place is nicer, so we’re going there,” Sehun says, turning back around to start the engine. “If even Junmyeon can be an adult about it, I’m sure you can, Tao.”

Junmyeon kicks her seat for revenge, entirely aware that it only underscores Sehun’s point.

They ride in silence for a while, as Sehun drives and Zitao and Junmyeon pout. Internally, Junmyeon has a battle between her manners and desire to nurture, which demand that she ask if Zitao has had dinner, and her lingering petulance, which insists that she doesn’t _care_ if Zitao has had dinner. 

Glancing over, she finds Zitao hunched in on herself and curled up against the door of the car like she’s trying to sit as far from Junmyeon as possible. Junmyeon purses her lips. She feels guilty as hell, and worried. Zitao is in pain.

“Have you eaten?” Junmyeon asks, finally, deciding that she can put aside her breakup beefs until Zitao gets better. Zitao startles and meets her eyes for the first time all evening. She quickly looks back down at her fingers, but she nods.

When they arrive home, Junmyeon fetches Zitao a glass of water. Zitao takes the water with a quiet “thank you” and listens as Junmyeon rattles off which painkillers they have, and which would be best if Zitao needs something in the middle of the night. 

Zitao sleeps in Sehun’s bed on Sehun’s insistence. Junmyeon can hear a soft argument through the wall as she goes to bed, but she can’t make out individual words. Whatever it’s about, it doesn’t last long, and it’s only Junmyeon’s mind that keeps her awake late into the night.

 

 

The next day, Yifan calls to offer her the job. It’s all Junmyeon can do not to hand in her resignation the second she gets off the phone. Yifan emails her the contract, and she prints it out to look over and sign that evening.

She gets home to find Sehun sitting at the table, clearly waiting for her. Her lips are pressed into a straight line, and she sits with tense shoulders.

“I want Tao to stay here for a few days, so I can take care of her,” Sehun says. She doesn’t ask if it’s okay, but Junmyeon knows the question is implied.

“That’s fine,” Junmyeon says. It’ll be awkward, yes, but bearable. “How are you planning to convince her to do that?”

“I threatened to refuse to ever dog sit for her when she finally gets a puppy if she doesn’t show up here right after work,” Sehun says.

It’s a weirdly mundane threat to use to prevent Zitao from carrying out her far-from-mundane extracurricular activities, which Junmyeon is certain is the true goal of babysitting her. Junmyeon is growing accustomed to the weird mundanity of everything.

Two hours later, she’s sitting at the table with Sehun, Zitao, and Minseok once again, eating probably the most awkward pizza of her life. Junmyeon keeps trying to talk, but Zitao is quiet, and Sehun is quiet because Zitao is making her tense, and she clams up when she’s tense. Minseok is just a generally quiet person, and she can only talk so long on idle small talk topics.

They’ve fallen into a lull when Zitao speaks up out of the blue. “Unnie, you can’t go to work for Yifan’s clinic.”

“What else do you suggest?” Junmyeon asks. “That I keep working at my current clinic? The one with the demons that want to kill me?”

Oops. That was hardly the right thing to say to maintain a civil atmosphere. Sehun sighs pointedly.

“They’ll want to kill you more if you work for Yifan. At least where you are now, the threat will be gone once we figure out who the demon is.”

“Will it?” Junmyeon asks. “It seems to me that the threat is always there, just like the threat of sexual assault or being mugged. At least I can’t delude myself into pretending it doesn’t exist if I go to work for Dr. Wu.”

This time, it’s Minseok who sighs. “If we’re going to talk about demons, maybe we can talk about likely suspects while the two of you are in the same room?”

Going quiet, Junmyeon nods. If she were the only person at risk, she’d probably argue longer. But she’s spent the whole day worrying about Seungyeon and Jongin’s safety, so she doesn’t protest.

“Zitao, have you found any leads?” Minseok asks when they’ve both fallen silent.

“Not much,” Zitao says. “So far everyone from Unnie’s list has seemed pretty normal, but I haven’t had the chance to examine Kim Junsu yet. I was following him when I was attacked.”

“Where were you when it happened?” Minseok asks.

“In front of a house,” Zitao responds. “I think Junsu went inside. I didn’t see him anywhere when I finally got the demon off of me.”

“Hmm,” Minseok says. “Would you recognize him, if you saw him again?”

 

 

The air outside is chilly. Junmyeon huffs and rubs her arms as she walks, wishing they could have brought her car. Or, really, that Minseok had brought someone else. It’s not like Junmyeon will be much good in the event that they’re attacked by a demon even Zitao can’t handle.

Alas, none of them was about to let Zitao come back to the scene of the crime before she’s recovered, and nobody but Sehun thought that Sehun going was a good idea. If anyone were to notice anything amiss, it would be far too easy to recall the woman of Amazonian stature who’d been loitering in the neighborhood. It made more sense for two small women to go.

“Are you going to accept the job?” Minseok asks, as she and Junmyeon scan the houses on the street for the right address. The buildings are pressed in cheek-and-jowl, all nondescript two- and three-story houses that sit right on the one-way street, except for the ones set back far enough to allow for a one-car driveway. Aside from the occasional tree or hedge, there’s very little vegetation in sight. There aren’t even weeds growing in the gutters. 

“I already did,” Junmyeon says. She’d handed in her resignation that morning, with the requisite month’s notice.

Minseok pauses in her search for a moment to raise an eyebrow at Junmyeon.

“You’re not going to tell me your ex is a horrible person, are you?” Junmyeon asks, avoiding Lu Han’s name in case there are demons around to recognize it.

Shaking her head, Minseok goes back to looking at the houses. “She’s fine. I just didn’t think you’d take a job that would keep you tied to all of this once the… issue at your current job has been solved.”

“Well, at least I know I’m not working with homophobes,” Junmyeon says. That was a big part of her decision, if not the whole one. “And… Miss Hwang’s not going to stop being part of my life, unless I want to lose Sehun, too. I’m not about to pass up a job just because it means I might see her. I’d be at risk even if I didn’t take the job.”

“I see,” Minseok says. Then she pauses and drops her voice. “That’s the house.”

Following Minseok’s gesture, Junmyeon sees the residence Zitao had described to them a few days ago. It’s a narrow, unassuming three-story building with a garage on the ground level and a front door tucked off to the side. 

Junmyeon scans the street for signs of life while Minseok scouts out a spot to hide her camera. It’s hard to imagine that there could be one, on this narrow road. It’s even harder to imagine that Junmyeon will be any use as a lookout.

Junmyeon glances around at the walls of the houses. It's hard to imagine that Minseok could hide a camera _anywhere_ around here. Someone will find the camera, and the police will trace it back to Minseok's computer, and they'll all go to jail. Junmyeon is sure of it. Unless they’re caught and killed by demons first, which is a possibility she’d prefer not to entertain.

Minseok is less concerned. She chooses a spot on the wall of the adjacent house and sets to work, and Junmyeon turns her back again to keep watch. 

Her heart thuds loudly in her chest, even though the street is dead quiet. It's close to midnight. Everyone should be in bed. Nobody will discover them. And yet Junmyeon can't calm down. 

Behind Junmyeon, Minseok moves silently enough that Junmyeon wouldn't have any idea someone was there if she didn't know. Starting to wonder if Minseok has been kidnapped behind her back, Junmyeon turns around briefly. 

Minseok is still there. 

There's a quiet crunch in the distance. Junmyeon isn't even sure it isn't from an animal, but she turns around and tugs Minseok's sleeve, anyway. If they wait until she can see what made the noise, they'll be spotted. 

Even if they leave down the road now, they'll probably be spotted. Junmyeon starts to panic. 

Without pausing to evaluate the situation herself, Minseok grabs Junmyeon's hand and pulls her into a crouch between the neighbor's car and house. 

Hiding hadn't occurred to Junmyeon. She crouches uncomfortably—the gap is all of a foot wide, at most—and clings to Minseok's arm.

The soft crunch of footsteps comes slowly up the street, in the calm rhythm of someone not pressed for time. As it approaches them, Junmyeon struggles to regulate her breathing, certain that it must be audible on the quiet street. 

The footsteps stop just before they get to the car. There's a jingle, and then they walk up the front steps to the door Minseok had been setting up her camera to watch. 

A lock turns, the door opens and closes, and the sound of footsteps disappears inside. After a moment, Junmyeon peeks out at the front door and sees nobody. Minseok stands up cautiously, looks around, then waves at Junmyeon and mouths, "Let's go."

“Did you do it?” Junmyeon asks when they’re far enough down the street. In all her panicking, she hadn’t thought to check whether Minseok had been successful.

“Yep,” Minseok says. She turns to grin at Junmyeon. “Isn’t breaking the law fun?

 

The camera isn’t a video camera; instead, it’s set to take still photographs whenever it detects motion. That means that they don’t have to spend hours watching videos like the characters in a crime drama.

Unfortunately, it also means that their suspect list grows very quickly. The next day, Junmyeon sits down with ZItao to flip through the pictures that have come in. She does so begrudgingly, and only after Minseok tells her that it would take a very, very long time to email all the files to her so that she doesn’t have to sit with Zitao to look through them.

Judging from the way Zitao sits as far away from her as she can get and still see the screen, Junmyeon isn’t the only person uncomfortable with the arrangement.

The first shot is of the back of someone’s head, with just a tiny bit of cheek visible, and it’s hard to tell who he is. He’s not particularly tall, and he’s wearing a nice shirt and slacks, but that’s not much to go on. They flip to the second picture, and again it’s the back of someone’s head. This time, Junmyeon is pretty sure that it’s Junsu. 

When the third photograph is another back-of-the-head shot, Junmyeon starts to worry that they’ll need to go back and move the camera. 

She flips quickly to the next photograph and freezes. 

This one was taken of a tall man leaving the house, and it shows his face clearly. Junmyeon recognizes him as Dr. Shim Changmin, a neurosurgeon who works with her sister.

“They could just be gay or something,” Sehun supplies from behind them, after Junmyeon explains her shock. “Or friends. We don’t have any evidence that they’re demons yet.”

“Don’t neurosurgeons do dangerous surgeries, though?” Zitao asks. “If he sticks to patients who aren’t likely to survive their surgeries, he could get by without raising any eyebrows.”

A wave of nausea hits Junmyeon at the thought. How many times had he faced bereaved families and lied about doing his best? Junmyeon could hardly deal with the guilt even when she knew a patient death was not her fault.

There are still two more pictures. Suppressing a shudder, Junmyeon taps the button to roll over to the next, then hits the button again when they see Kim Junsu’s face.

This one also contains a visible face, but Junmyeon doesn’t recognize it. Beside her, Zitao sighs.

“That’s the demon who hurt me.”

Then chances are even higher that Junmyeon and her sister have been working with demons. Her mind races with a million little thoughts so fast she can’t keep track of them and thinks the same things twice: her sister is in danger; no, the demon wouldn’t risk attacking a colleague; _Junmyeon_ is working with a demon, and Jongin still will be when Junmyeon leaves. 

Standing up, Zitao stretches and turns toward the coat closet.

“What are you doing?” Sehun asks.

“I’ll need to confirm that they’re all demons before I can start picking them off,” Zitao points out. 

“And you’re going to return to the place where you were injured to scope them out _while you’re still injured?_ ” Minseok asks.

“No, she’s not,” Sehun says. As if to make her words a reality, she gets up and gently steers a protesting Zitao toward the couch. “Shouldn’t we wait a few more days to make sure that’s all of them, Tao? That’s a big house.”

“But more people will die the longer we wait,” Zitao says.

“Even more people than that will die if you get yourself killed,” Minseok points out.

“How about we wait a few more days to assess the situation, and then you can ask an uninjured hunter to start following them?” Junmyeon suggests. She’s grasping at straws, hoping that Zitao knows someone who can help.

After a moment, Zitao nods. Junmyeon feels an odd mix of relief and alarm, since it means that she and her friend and sister will all be working with demons longer.

 

Long after Minseok has gone home and the rest have gone to bed, Junmyeon’s rushing thoughts won’t calm down enough to let her sleep. She turns over for maybe the thirtieth time to find light leaking around the edges of her door.

She finds Zitao at the table in her pajamas, staring at the program that loads the camera’s photographs when they’re taken. There’s a glass of water sitting next to her on the table. 

“Tao-yah, it defeats the purpose of having a motion detector if you spend all your time sitting in front of the screen anyway,” Junmyeon says softly, so as not to wake Sehun. Talking to Zitao is still awkward, but Junmyeon doesn’t want to leave her to suffer alone.

Zitao presses her fingers against her eyes, then sighs and drops her head to the table. “I can’t sleep.”

Oh. “Me neither.”

Slipping around behind Zitao, Junmyeon prods a finger into her trapezius. It’s as tense as it looks, so Junmyeon puts both hands on Zitao’s shoulders and massages them. Zitao groans in what Junmyeon doesn’t think is a protest, but she isn’t sure.

“Come over to the couch so I can get this tension out?” She tries, tentatively. 

Zitao nods into the table. She gives Junmyeon a small smile as she gets up and drifts over to the couch. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Junmyeon says. “I can’t sleep, either.”

They’re silent for a long moment as Junmyeon kneads Zitao’s shoulders and back. The warmth of Zitao’s skin seeps into Junmyeon’s hands through her nightshirt, and she enjoys it despite the awkwardness lingering between them.

After a while, Zitao sighs. “I wish we could have been like this.”

“Like what?” Junmyeon asks, not sure exactly what Zitao means.

“Normal. Not complicated,” Zitao says. “Peaceful.”

“Ahh,” Junmyeon says. She doesn’t know what more to say; ‘I wish that, too’ would sound like an accusation, even if it’s the truth. 

“It’s not like it was your choice,” Junmyeon tries. At least, it doesn’t sound like Zitao volunteered to be a magical demon hunter girl.

“That’s what I mean,” Zitao says, tensing beneath Junmyeon’s hands. “I wish I had a choice. I wanted so bad to date you like a normal person, but it was hard. I was really excited for the date we had at that French restaurant, but then I got stuck tailing a possible demon and rescheduled. And then the night before the new date I got stuck waiting outside a club watching someone until really late. I knew I was too tired to go, but I didn’t want to make you reschedule it again.”

“Oh, Tao,” Junmyeon sighs. She knows this story too well from her own attempts at dating during her residency. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t not hunt,” Zitao says. “If I stop, then people die. But I also have to work for a living. When there’s an outbreak like this, I can’t have a personal life.”

“So the school doesn’t pay you for the hunting part of your job?” Junmyeon asks.

Zitao shakes her head. “A long time ago, they were able to operate on donations from the general population, at least in Qingdao. The school was more of a way of identifying people with the ability to be hunters. Now fewer and fewer people believe in things like soul-sucking demons, so the school has become our major source of income. The bosses are as accommodating of hunters’ time as they can afford to be, but that’s not really much.”

“I see,” Junmyeon says.

An idea occurs to Junmyeon, then, because she suspects that Sehun will move in with Minseok before long, but she stores it away for later. Even if she and Zitao weren’t technically broken up, it would still be too soon in their relationship for Junmyeon to propose that Zitao quit her job and move in with Junmyeon.

Sighing, she gives up on the massage and pulls Zitao into a hug instead. Zitao buries her head against Junmyeon’s shoulder and sighs back.

“I want this to be over,” she says. “I want a normal life, with a normal job and a girlfriend and a dog. I wish this organization had never discovered me.”

“I understand, Taozi,” Junmyeon responds, because she does. “But please don’t try to rush it. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

Zitao nods into her shoulder.

“I’ll tell you what,” Junmyeon says. She has to pause to yawn before she can continue, “Tomorrow I’ll take you to dinner after work. There’s no harm in taking some time to yourself, especially not when you need to recover.”

“Really?” Zitao perks up for a moment, then deflates. “But it’s dangerous for you to be seen with me.”

“I’ve already accepted the job at Yifan’s clinic,” Junmyeon says. “I’m going to be involved with hunters one way or another once I start.”

Zitao frowns at her, but then she shakes her head. “Maybe we can stay in? If this Kim Junsu is a demon, then I should at least avoid being seen with you until you’re no longer working with him. You’ve already made him nervous once.”

“You’re not going to protest my decision to work for Yifan again?” Junmyeon asks, surprised. 

“Sehun got on my case about that,” Zitao says. “And she’s right that it’s your decision to make.

“Besides,” she adds, looking up coyly through her eyelashes. “I wouldn’t mind having a hot doctor take care of me when I’m injured.”

She looks so adorably hopeful that Junmyeon can’t resist teasing. “And I wouldn’t mind having the occasional hot patient. That Yixing is gorgeous.”

“Unnie!” Zitao yelps loudly, scandalized. Belatedly remembering that it’s the middle of the night, she claps her hands over her mouth and glances toward Sehun’s door.

With a laugh, Junmyeon ruffles her hair and gives her another quick hug. “Do you think you can sleep now, Taozi?”

 

 

The following evening, Junmyeon insists that they leave the surveillance photos alone for the day, because she doesn’t want to spend their ‘date’ panicking about her colleagues being demons. They might as well make the most of their time, she argues, since they’ve kicked Sehun out for the evening. 

She drags Zitao into marathoning Sailor Moon with her on the couch. They drink wine with their pizza, and Zitao dozes off on Junmyeon’s shoulder after six episodes. Junmyeon tries to stay up longer, just because it’s a Friday night, but eventually she catches herself drifting off. She wakes Zitao enough to get her to bed before flopping into her own.

All in all it’s a fairly quiet date, but Zitao seems less stressed at the end of the day than she was the night before, so Junmyeon counts it as a win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, Junmyeon took a break from moping for a second there.
> 
> As always, comments are loved!


	8. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I'm done with editing, so I'm posting the final three chapters today! This (Chapter 7, or 8 by AO3's chapter index) is the first of those three.

The next Monday, Junmyeon gets home after work to any empty apartment. After digging in the refrigerator to see if they've got anything healthy and difficult to ruin and coming up empty, save for some vegetable drinks, she texts Zitao to pick up some fresh vegetables on her way home and looks around for something to kill the time until people show up. 

It's odd, expecting so many people to be around. She's used to having Sehun some nights and being alone the nights she works late; now Sehun usually comes with Minseok in tow, and Zitao is here even when Sehun isn't. 

When it's Minseok who rings the doorbell first, Junmyeon shakes her head. It’s like she’s got three roommates now instead of one.

"Sehun told me you told her to get vegetables, but also that she doesn't trust you anywhere near the stove," Minseok says, hefting two bags of groceries. "So I volunteered to make us something." 

Junmyeon blinks and steps back to let her into the apartment. "Um, thank you?" 

"No problem," Minseok waves her off. "I'm guessing you wanted to make sure Zitao eats something healthy while she recovers?" 

Junmyeon nods. "Am I that transparent?"

With a shrug and a little grin, Minseok says, "Sehun says that if I want to know what you're going to do, I should ask myself what a mother hen would do." 

She places the grocery bags on the counter and starts sorting things into the fridge and cabinets or leaving them out by the sink. 

Blushing, Junmyeon wakes up the computer just to have an excuse to turn away from Minseok. She bites her lip as she types in the password. "I've been told I'm overbearing." 

"Sometimes," Minseok says. Junmyeon opens the surveillance camera footage. "According to Sehun, anyway. But it's not a bad thing that you like to take care of people. Even Sehun appreciates it most of the time."

"That's-"

Whatever response Junmyeon was about to make dies a quick death on her tongue as she flips through their potographs. The third picture in this time shows a very clear face, and it's one she recognizes. 

"Junmyeon, are you okay?" Minseok asks.

Junmyeon opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out. She gestures at the screen instead. 

"Do you know that person?" Minseok asks, looking over her shoulder at the screen. 

"Director Park," Junmyeon finally squeaks out. "Park Yoochun. Hospital bigwig. Tried to ask me out once. Friendly with my sister." 

"I see." 

The darker parts of the computer screen show Minseok's reflection, so Junmyeon can see her mouth go thin at the news. 

"Fuck," Junmyeon says. 

Standing up, she walks to the bathroom, lifts the toilet seat, and vomits.

She’s lying on the couch when Zitao gets in an hour later. 

“I can start tracking them tonight, if it would make you feel safer,” Zitao says, wrapping her arms around Junmyeon’s back and pulling her in. “I still need more confirmation that they’re actually demons before I can take them out, but I know your sister knows a bunch of these people.”

Junmyeon shakes her head against Zitao’s chest. “Can’t someone else from your organization go?”

Her head rises and falls with Zitao’s worried sigh. “They’re all tracking other suspects.”

“I’ll see if I can get Yixing to lend a hand,” Minseok offers.

They all agree that it’s the best course of action, but it doesn’t calm Junmyeon’s anxiety any. She has another rough night, then gears up for another awkward day at work, where most of her colleagues aren’t acknowledging her impending departure at all. 

Jongin asks if she’s okay all morning. When Junmyeon slips into the breakroom to get a cup of coffee between patients, Jongin is already there, pressing a hot cup into her hands. 

“Don’t worry, I taste-tested it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned,” she murmurs as she passes by to prep the exam room.

It just hits Junmyeon like a punch to the gut, because she can’t decide if it’s better to leave Jongin in blissful but dangerous ignorance, or to tell her to get a job elsewhere. For all Junmyeon has always thought of Jongin as Sehun’s friend, they’ve grown close in their time together at the clinic. Junmyeon’s appreciation of Jongin’s longtime friendship with Sehun has morphed into an appreciation of Jongin in general as the embodiment of what everyone in the healthcare industry should aim to be. The thought of someone like her working unknowingly with demons exploiting their patients is nauseating.

She’s not sure she could convince Jongin to leave without mentioning demons, though, and what if all of the clinics in the area are like this one? There’s no telling how many demons there could be in the area if they’re feeding off people already dying.

She’s still sipping her coffee and pondering her options when the doctor she’s come to think of as ‘Nice-ish Dr. Lee,’ Lee Sungmin, walks into the breakroom. 

“Oh, Dr. Kim,” he says, quietly, with the same broad grin he used to give her before the last holiday party. “I hear you’re leaving us.”

Junmyeon just nods. This Dr. Lee may not be the worst antagonist in the office, but he hasn’t exactly done anything to stop the way their colleagues have treated Junmyeon.

Dr. Lee walks over to the coffee maker. “I’m sorry, by the way. I feel bad for the way everyone’s been acting.”

“Then why haven’t you done anything?” Junmyeon asks, harshly. She’s been miserable, and the stress and lack of sleep makes her less capable of hiding her feelings. They shouldn’t treat anyone the way they’ve treated her, and she’s fed up. Knowing the likelihood that she’ll get any answer is slim, she prepares herself to sweep out of the room dramatically.

With a sigh, Dr. Lee pulls out the carafe and pours half of the remaining coffee into his enormous mug. 

“I honestly would have, if it weren’t for Director Park,” he says.

Junmyeon drops her cup of coffee on the floor. 

“Fuck,” she says. If she’s going to be unusually aggressive at work, she might as well go all out, right?

Grabbing some paper towels, Dr. Lee rushes over and starts mopping up the coffee. Junmyeon grabs the broom from the corner, noting in the process that her pants are ruined. Double fuck.

“Director Park?” She asks. Her hands are nearly shaking too much to use the broom. Dr. Lee notices and takes the broom from her hands after he throws away his wad of paper towels.

“Director Park from the board,” Dr. Lee says. “He’s made it very clear that he doesn’t like you. Things haven’t worked out so well for employees who’ve been friendly with people he doesn’t like in the past.”

A chill runs down Junmyeon’s spine. “Haven’t worked out well how?”

“They’re usually fired, after he chases away his main target,” Dr. Lee says. It says something about the way Junmyeon’s life has been going lately that she’s actually relieved that’s _all_ that happens to them. 

“How long has he been on the board?” Junmyeon asks.

“Just two years,” Lee says. “He was in Busan before that.”

“I see.”

“Anyway,” Lee continues. “I’m glad that you’ve found someplace else to work.”

“What about Jongin?” Junmyeon asks. “Will he try to fire her?”

Dr. Lee hums in thought. “I’m not sure. He hasn’t said anything about her lately.” 

Junmyeon chews on that for the rest of the day. Does Director Park want her gone because he’s afraid her girlfriend will discover he’s a demon? Or is he human, and just an asshole who can’t handle rejection? It seems odd for the latter to be the case, but maybe he’d been humiliated by Junmyeon’s rejection happening in a public space.

Either way, she’s unsettled. She can’t stomach eating lunch, so she gives her leftovers from Minseok to Jongin instead and lives on coffee for the rest of the day. Jongin gives her a worried look but accepts the food. 

“This is really good, Unnie,” she says several minutes later. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

Junmyeon shakes her head. “Not hungry.”

“Aren’t you going out to dinner with your sister later? Are you even going to be able to eat?”

A fresh wave of nausea hits Junmyeon at the reminder. She doesn’t know how she’ll be able to get dinner without panicking or asking a million questions about Seungyeon’s colleagues.

By suppertime, Junmyeon is hungry enough that she thinks she might be able to stomach food despite her anxiety, but that changes when she walks into the restaurant.

Seated at a table by the windows are her sister and Director Park. Junmyeon considers turning and walking away, but Seungyeon looks up and spots her before she can.

Both smile and wave, and Junmyeon smiles back and wends her way to the table. She fingers the cheap plastic ring she’s been wearing nearly constantly since the surveillance photographs started coming out.

“Hello Director Park,” she says. “Unnie.”

“I’m sorry for butting into your dinner plans,” Director Park says as she settles at the table and places a napkin in her lap. A strange, pleasant feeling wraps around her when she does. If she hadn’t thought to look for it, she might mistake it for the cheerful feeling of sitting down to dinner with a loved one after a long day work.

Too bad for Director Park. Under the table, Junmyeon twists the ring on her finger so that the uncomfortable seam scrapes along her skin. She leverages the brief discomfort to cling to the spark of panic and rage that had shot through her when she spotted Director Park and, for once in her life, tells it to grow instead of shrinking away.

“I heard you were leaving, and I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t because anything untoward happened,” Director Park continues.

Snake. Junmyeon wants to claw his throat out. He knows exactly what kind of ‘untoward’ things have been happening. 

Seungyeon glances between them, confused. “Did something happen, Junmyeon?”

Shaking her head, Junmyeon pauses while the waitress asks her drink order—she sticks to her glass of water—then turns back to the conversation, smiling with her mouth closed to cover her clenched teeth. “It’s like I told you, I’m only leaving because a close friend needed another doctor at her clinic.”

Her face smoothing back into a benign, innocent smile, Seungyeon takes a sip of her wine.

It’s so so so wrong. Desperate and panicking, Junmyeon excuses herself to the bathroom just to get away from Director Park and her hypnotized sister for a moment.

Once inside, she locks herself in a stall and fumbles her phone from her purse. She shouldn’t ask Zitao to do anything risky when she’s still injured, but she doesn’t know what else to do. Opening Kakao Talk, she sends a message to Zitao, Minseok, and Sehun.

_Park showed to my dinner w SY @ Lucille Restaurant trying to hypnotize me help_

She’s washing her hands when she receives a reply from Minseok. 

_On my way. Will stay near door in case he tries something. Try to act normal._

With a deep breath, Junmyeon tucks her phone away and returns to the table.

She spends the dinner fighting to keep up with the conversation through a blank, deafening wall of adrenaline coating her brain. Idly, she wonders if she’ll remember every detail in vivid detail later, or if it’ll be a giant blur in her mind. Her food tastes like cardboard, but she eats it all anyway.

When they’ve all finished their entrees, Seungyeon excuses herself to the bathroom. Junmyeon barely refrains from begging her sister to stay with her or following her to the bathroom and demanding that they sneak out through the kitchen and never come back.

As Seungyeon disappears into the bathroom, Director Park clears his throat.

“Your sister is a nice woman,” he comments. “And a great doctor. She saves a lot of lives.”

“She’s wonderful,” Junmyeon says, casting around her sterile mind for any scrap of what she’d be saying if she were an oblivious employee talking to a company senior about her sister. “She’s also married, Director Park, so I do hope you’re not getting any ideas.”

“Oh, no,” Director Park laughs. “I just would hate to think of anything bad happening to her. It would be a tragedy for her family, the hospital, and the whole country.”

Junmyeon freezes with her hands on her silverware, and Director Park leans toward her. “So I hope that you will keep your mouth shut and tell your girlfriend to keep her nose where it belongs.”

Setting her utensils down on the plate with a clatter, Junmyeon says nothing while they wait for Seungyeon to return. After all, what can she say? She’s being offered the choice of the safety of her sister or all of the sick patients who walk through the hospital’s doors. This is not the kind of difficult decision she’d expected to face when she chose to become a pediatrician in a hospital-affiliated clinic.

Of course, that’s assuming he really is a demon. Maybe he’s a bullying hospital director trying to cover his tracks, Junmyeon reasons. He’s in some polyamorous relationship with Kim Junsu and Shim Changmin and doesn’t want anyone at the hospital to know. And simultaneously has it in for lesbians? Junmyeon is officially grasping at straws, and she knows it.

When Seungyeon comes back, she asks if anyone wants dessert, seemingly oblivious to Junmyeon’s distress. Junmyeon shakes her head. 

Director Park declines dessert, but he asks if Seungyeon would like to “ditch Junmyeon and come see a movie with him.” 

“A movie?” Seungyeon asks. “Which one?”

The fact that she would consider going to a movie with a man clearly flirting without anyone else present is so unlike Seungyeon that the last lingering doubt Junmyeon had as to whether this was really a case of demon hypnosis slips away. Even if she were feeling pressured, Seungyeon is as practiced in the fine art of demurring without causing offense as Junmyeon. She’d at least _try_ to get out of it.

But Junmyeon still isn't sure how much Director Park thinks she knows. If she interferes indelicately, she may be giving herself away further.

"Unnie, I don't think your husband would like that," Junmyeon tries. Perhaps jogging her memory will break Seungyeon out of the spell.

"Why would he mind?" Seungyeon asks, instead.

Junmyeon sighs. 

Across the table, Director Park smiles benignly at her. Then his face morphs into the least believable feigned expression of shock Junmyeon has ever seen.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Director Park says. "I just remembered I've got a meeting early tomorrow morning. I should get home to sleep. Maybe another time?”

Seungyeon actually looks crestfallen. Resisting the urge to grab her sister and run, Junmyeon waits politely for Director Park to finish paying the bill and walks with them to the door. She thanks Park for the dinner and lies through clenched teeth about hoping to see him again soon. 

Minseok is standing at the entrance to the restaurant’s small parking lot, tucked up against the wall with her phone like she's waiting for a date.

"Oh, Unnie!" Junmyeon says, fairly certain that acting surprised is the way to go when she's pretty sure that Director Park is still watching. She pulls Seungyeon to a halt by the arm. "I didn't expect to see you here. Is it date night with Sehun?"

Smiling innocently, Minseok shakes her head. "Nope, I was just meeting some coworkers. Got a bit too drunk to drive home, so I've been texting people for a ride."

"Oh," Junmyeon says. It’s a far-fetched story, but Minseok is still brilliant. It's really unfair. "Seungyeon-unnie's taking me back to my place. I'm sure she could take you home, too."

She jostles Seungyeon's arm, knowing full well that Seungyeon is too well-mannered to refuse. 

"Maybe just to your place?" Minseok suggests. “It's close enough that I can come back for my car when I've sobered up."

"Are you sure?" Seungyeon asks, giving Minseok a curious look like she’s wondering who this woman is. "It wouldn't be a bother for me to take you home."

"Oh, Unnie!" Junmyeon says, belatedly realizing that Seungyeon has never met Minseok. "We must not have introduced you yet. This is Kim Minseok. She and Sehun have been going out for months."

"Oh!" Seungyeon says. She smiles and ducks a greeting bow. "Then it's nice to meet you."

"You weren’t seriously going to go to the movies with him, were you?" Junmyeon asks, when they’re all in the car. 

Frowning, Seungyeon shakes her head. “I don’t know what it is with him. He always seems so nice when I’m around him that I find myself doing the weirdest things. Like letting him hit on my sister.”

Junmyeon shares an uncomfortable look with Minseok. 

“I’ve heard rumors about him,” she says. “That he’s bullied people out of the company.”

“I’ve heard that, too, but it’s so hard to imagine when he’s always so nice,” Seungyeon responds. “He’d have to be really underhanded.”

Even six months ago, Junmyeon would have been exasperated at her sister’s naïveté; now it’s unbearable. To Seungyeon, any information that doesn’t match with her own perception of a person must be untrue. Junmyeon struggles to hold in her sigh until she’s getting out of the car in front of her apartment. 

Allowing her sister to drive away in ignorance nearly kills Junmyeon. Her hands ball helplessly into fists at her sides as she watches Seungyeon pull away from the curb and drive down the street.

“He threatened to hurt her,” she hisses when they’re inside the apartment. “If Tao keeps snooping.”

Zitao and Sehun turn to them from the couch and stare. Belatedly, Junmyeon realizes that Yixing is sitting with them. She waves, and Yixing waves back.

Minseok’s mouth presses into a thin line. “So he knows.”

“We need to get moving, then,” Zitao says. After a pause, her eyes widen. “Sorry, Unnie. That sounded bad. I just meant your sister will be safer if we take them by surprise. We can’t just back off.”

“No, I understand,” Junmyeon says. It’s the inevitable conclusion. “It’s Seungyeon and Tao’s safety or hundreds of other people’s.”

“Could you get Seungyeon to go on vacation for a while?” Sehun asks. “Maybe give her cruise tickets?”

Junmyeon sees a problem with that even before she finishes her excited of breath, and all the air goes back out as a sigh. “She’d have to request leave at work. He’s probably going to be keeping an eye on her leave requests now. It would be a dead giveaway that we were planning something.”

“There are a million other things we need to plan out before we can get there, anyway,” Minseok says. She shepherds them all to the table, grabbing a piece of paper, a pen, and some sausages along the way. 

Zitao sits next to Junmyeon and slides her fingers between Junmyeon’s beneath the table. Junmyeon squeezes her hand, half to reassure Zitao and half to plead for reassurance. She gets a light squeeze back, and then Minseok is talking.

“We have a problem,” Minseok says through a bite of sausage, gesticulating with the rest of the sausage in her hand. On any other day, Sehun might snark about Minseok stating the obvious, or Junmyeon might giggle at the sausage. The unusual silence both illustrates the gravity of the situation and underscores it. 

“We have a lot of problems,” Zitao says with a sigh.

Minseok finishes chewing her bite of sausage before responding this time. “Yes, but one in particular stands out.”

“Which?”

Pulling the sheet of paper toward herself, Minseok begins writing names on a sheet of paper in a set of bubbles with lines connecting them: _Park Yoochun, Kim Junsu, Shim Changmin, Unknown Demon (codename Prettyface)._ As Junmyeon idly thinks that it looks like a relationship map from a drama, Minseok draws a large circle around that group of names and writes _known associates_. Then she draws a dotted line between that group and writes _Jung Yunho?_ next to it.

“Ordinarily, we’re dealing with one demon at a time, right?” Minseok says, eyeing Zitao. Zitao nods. “At most we’ll find a few living together.

“But here we’re dealing with something different. We have one confirmed, deceased demon,” she taps Jung Yunho’s name. “We have multiple suspected demons holding down jobs at the same organization, who are somehow connected to a known demon who has escaped the formidable Huang Zitao on multiple occasions.”

Sighing, Minseok pauses to take another bite of her sausage. Her stomach growls as she does, and Junmyeon finally connects that she must have missed her dinner to come to Junmyeon’s rescue.

“Meaning that our normal approach won’t work,” Zitao supplies while Minseok chews.

“What’s the normal approach?” Junmyeon asks.

“Ordinarily, we’d follow a demon until we had an idea of its habits. We identify vulnerable locations in its routine, like places where we might be able to get away with killing it without a fuss. If there aren’t any, we look for a way to chase them away from people.”

“I see,” Junmyeon says.

“But in this case,” Zitao continues, “That’s risky. Director Park and Prettyface know we’ve been watching them, and we can reasonably expect that they’ve told Junsu and Changmin.”

This appears to be making sense to Sehun, who keeps nodding along, but Junmyeon is starting to feel lost. Fighting strategies are not her forte. 

“Meaning?” She tries.

“Meaning that they’re going to be on their guards. If they’re smart, they may try to trap us instead of the other way around. And they seem to be smart,” Minseok adds. 

“And if we spook them, or try to take out one at a time, they may all flee,” Sehun says. “Making them harder to track down and get rid of.”

“We’d be right back where we started,” Yixing chips in.

“So what do we do?” Junmyeon asks.

Minseok and Zitao both sigh and stare at the paper. “Good question.”

“Would it be possible to assign a hunter to take down each of them when they’re all in different locations?” Sehun asks. “We could pick a day when Junsu is scheduled at the clinic and Changmin at the hospital. Figuring out Director Park’s location shouldn’t be too hard. We really just need to figure out who Prettyface is and where he goes.”

“’Just,’” Zitao snorts. “Prettyface has kicked my ass before.”

A thought occurs to Junmyeon then, something that’s been bothering her this whole time. She worries at the inside of her lip with her teeth as she runs it through her head before speaking.

“Is Prettyface the only one of them you’d met before, Tao?” She asks.

Zitao nods.

“So if one of them were to have recognized you, it would have been him.”

Zitao nods again.

“Then chances are high that he was at the holiday party.”

It’s odd to think of it. They’re calling him Prettyface mostly because he’s so pretty it freaks them all out. If he was at the holiday party, Junmyeon’s certain she would remember his face. 

But if he wasn’t at the party, there were only a handful of places he could have seen Junmyeon with Zitao before the bullying started at work. They’d only gone to a restaurant and Junmyeon’s family’s house together. 

"So Prettyface probably works for the hospital," Minseok says. "Can you ask Seungyeon if she knows who he is?"

Junmyeon frowns. She doesn't want to involve her sister in this any more than necessary. All they have to give her is a surveillance photo, anyway. Seungyeon would doubtless wonder what Junmyeon was up to.

"You can tell her the picture was from the police, and you thought you recognized him?" Sehun tries.

"That sounds even more suspicious," Junmyeon says. "How about I start with looking through the physician profiles online and save the asking questions for if he's not there?"

"That works as well as anything," Minseok says. "Yixing and Tao, do you know anyone who could help with the targeting? You two aren't enough hunters."

Yixing nods. "Song Qian just got in from China two days ago. She'll pout, but she'll do it."

"And I can ask Krystal to take a break from her target to help us," Tao adds.

"Who's Krystal?" Junmyeon asks. It's the first name she's heard that isn't Chinese.

"She works for my school," Zitao says. "Her Korean name is Soojung, but she’s spent so much time in the US that she prefers her English name."

"Why are all the other hunters Chinese?" Junmyeon asks. 

Even as the question passes through her lips, her brain is supplying the logical answer that Zitao probably just knows more Chinese people than Koreans. Still, they're in Korea, and it seems odd to her that they've had to import so many hunters.

The two hunters at the table and Minseok all share a grim look. Zitao's hand tenses around Junmyeon's, but she avoids Junmyeon's eyes.

"The Korean hunters have been disappearing," Minseok says. 

"Disappearing how?" Junmyeon asks. The implication was clear enough from the mood at the table, but she can't help but hope it was a clumsy way of saying they've had the same problem that Minseok has.

"Some like me," Minseok sighs. "They're around, but they can't use weapons anymore. More are just plain disappearing, though, or turning up dead. There weren't that many to begin with."

"Is that why they brought you here, Tao?" Junmyeon turns to Zitao, who keeps her eyes cast down at Minseok's paper.

Across the table, Sehun looks as horrified as Junmyeon feels. Clearly, Junmyeon isn't the only one feeling misled.

"Partly," Zitao says finally. "It's not as bad as it sounds. Like Minseok said, there weren't many hunters here to begin with. With the amount of people we've brought over from other countries, we'll be able to stamp out what's going on without losing too many more hunters."

"Many more?" Sehun practically shouts. "Tao, why have you been acting like this is going to be a walk in the park?"

To be fair, Junmyeon doesn’t think Zitao has been acting like it’s going to be easy at all. She hasn’t been acting like she’s going to die, but she probably doesn’t want to think about that part herself.

Zitao curls in on herself and doesn't speak. It's not the right reaction for Sehun, who fumes.

"How long has this been going on?" Sehun goes on. "Is this why you came here in college? Or high school? Were they preparing you to go out and get killed from the time you were _sixteen_?"

"Sehun," Minseok says softly, rubbing Sehun's back, but Sehun shakes her arm off and gets up. "Unnie, why didn't _you_ tell me it's this bad?" 

"I didn't realize you didn't know," Minseok responds. 

"And you let Junmyeon-unnie go with you to help put that camera up? Did it occur to you that I might want to know that everyone I care about is at a serious risk of losing their fucking lives?" Sehun continues, like she didn't even hear Minseok. She storms to the door and puts on her shoes. "I'll be at Jongin's."

Minseok stares open mouthed as Sehun leaves, and Zitao keeps staring at the table. Yixing's brows are creased in some combination of confusion and concern, but Junmyeon can't bring herself to try to make their guest more comfortable. 

She also can't bring herself to speak. There's no point in going after Sehun until she cools off, and she doesn't know what else to say.

With a sigh, Minseok looks back at the paper in front of her. "Okay, so Yixing, you're gonna get Song Qian in, and Tao, you'll get in touch with Krystal?"

Yixing and Zitao both nod. 

"And Junmyeon, you'll see if you can identify Prettyface so we can start tracking him?"

"I'll get on it right now," Junmyeon says.

"Good. If that doesn't work, I'll stake out the hospital for a while and see if I spot him going in."

Nodding, Junmyeon holds in a plea to everyone to be careful. Sehun's outburst was traumatic enough.

"Then that's all we can do for now," Minseok says. "Let's all get home and try to get some rest. And if anyone has any bright ideas, please share."

Only Yixing moves right away. Junmyeon sees her to the door, muttering an apology about Sehun.

"It's okay," Yixing says. "It's not easy for anyone."

Neither of the other women has left the table when Junmyeon gets back to the kitchen. Minseok is texting someone on her phone, and Zitao is still staring blankly at the table. 

It would be out of place for Junmyeon to foist advice about dealing with an upset Sehun on Minseok, so she clamps her mouth shut. She tells herself that Sehun needs to know how _Minseok_ responds to these things, not how she responds on Junmyeon’s advice.

That leaves Zitao, who's got approximately nobody other than Junmyeon in Korea to lean on right now, from what Junmyeon has seen. 

On closer inspection, her eyes are glittering with tears. Junmyeon rests a hand on her shoulder and sits back in her seat.

"Are you okay, Taozi?" She asks. It's a dumb question, but she doesn't know what else to say.

Wordlessly, Zitao shakes her head and turns to wrap shaky arms around Junmyeon's shoulders. She manages to dislodge herself from her chair in the process and slides to her knees on the floor, accidentally pulling Junmyeon's torso down at an awkward angle. She drops her arms, sniffles, and opens her mouth like she's about to apologize, but Junmyeon shushes her with a finger on her lips. 

That's when Zitao finally loses it and begins to sob in earnest. Junmyeon slides her arms around Zitao's shoulders and runs fingers through her hair, letting Zitao cling to her waist.

Fingers brush Junmyeon's shoulder, and she looks up to see Minseok standing next to her. 

"I'm gonna go," Minseok murmurs. "I'll find the physician directory online and check it myself."

Nodding, Junmyeon thanks her, still planning to look at it herself if she has time later. 

"I'm sorry," Zitao manages to gasp out as Junmyeon struggles to manhandle her over to the couch. "I'm really, really sorry, Unnie."

"It's okay, Tao," Junmyeon tells her, not even really sure what the apologies are for. She gets them onto the couch and begins rocking Zitao gently. 

"I'm so scared," Zitao says. "Why are superheroes never scared in the movies? I'm always so scared."

Junmyeon tucks Zitao's head against her shoulder and grabs a small stack of leftover takeout napkins from the coffee table, the closest thing to tissues within arm's reach.

Taking the proffered napkins, Zitao raises an eyebrow at Junmyeon. Pausing several times when another sob makes her tense up, she says, "You and Hunnie are hopeless, Unnie."

Junmyeon laughs, patting Zitao on the head while she blows her nose. "Hey, it's better than nothing."

"Will Sehun ever forgive me?" Zitao asks. She rests her head on Junmyeon's shoulder again and looks up at her. Her eyes are wet, her face blotchy and red. Junmyeon kisses the crown of her head and rubs her back.

"Of course she will. It might take a while, but you're her best friend. She's just afraid she’ll lose you.”

It’s taken years for Junmyeon and Sehun to successfully navigate the waters between Junmyeon’s extroversion and Sehun’s introversion to minimize the number of explosive incidents. In the process, Junmyeon has learned that every one of the handful of people Sehun considers her friends is extremely important to her. That means that any threat to those relationships is stressful enough that she goes straight from happy to sheer panic or rage, but it also means that she has a lot of impetus to mend things rather than lose a friend.

When they’re in the middle of a fight initiated by Sehun (at least in terms of who got angry first, which Jongdae would insist is a patriarchal concept of instigation or something), Junmyeon has learned to look for anything Sehun might interpret as a threat to their relationship. In this case, though, the threat is obvious. 

Zitao convulses with another sob against Junmyeon’s shoulder. “I’m afraid, too.”

There’s nothing that Junmyeon can say to that; she can’t promise that everything will be fine when it may not be. 

Leaning down, she presses her lips to Zitao’s in a small, chaste kiss. Zitao kisses back lightly for a moment, but then she pulls away just far enough to speak.

“Unnie, what are you doing?”

“I was kissing you,” Junmyeon says. “Now I’m not.”

Zitao purses her lips in annoyance. “But why?”

“Because,” Junmyeon says. “I wanted to. Because I want to take care of you, and because I feel bad for the way I acted about the demon hunting thing.”

“But you shouldn’t—“ Zitao starts, pauses. “It’s not safe. I never should have gone after you. I was stupid to think I could keep you from getting involved.”

Rubbing Zitao’s back, Junmyeon sighs. She thought they’d had this conversation already, but now she remembers that they never finished it. “I was involved either way, Taozi. We just didn’t know it at the time. It’s too late for me to back out of anything now, anyway, so you might as well get a girlfriend who already knows about your second job. If you still want me, that is.”

Zitao gives her a small, tired smile. “Of course I do.”

“Then can I kiss you again?”

When Zitao nods, Junmyeon goes back to soft kisses. She keeps it light, continues rubbing little circles into Zitao’s back as she presses an inquisitive tongue up against the seam of Zitao’s lips. The goal is to comfort Zitao, not fuck her into oblivion like Junmyeon would really like to do any day of the week, so Junmyeon ignores the little sparks in her groin when Zitao’s fingers trace up under the hem of her shirt.

That determination goes out the window when Zitao tugs her down until they’re both lying against the cushions and pulls away to ask, “Is it too soon for me to beg you to fuck me?”

Junmyeon smiles at the bashful little smile on Zitao’s face. It’s heartbreaking in combination with the puffiness of her eyelids and lingering dampness in her eyelashes, so Junmyeon ducks down to kiss her again, more firmly this time.

“Never too soon,” she says.

Rolling on top of Zitao, she runs her hands down over Zitao’s torso to play with the skin above her waistband. Zitao hums into her mouth and grabs her ass to pull her close, the pressure giving Junmyeon a ripple of arousal. With a groan, Junmyeon deepens the kiss, slipping her tongue into Zitao’s mouth and exploring slowly but obscenely. 

When Zitao’s hips hitch beneath hers, Junmyeon slips to the side enough to slot one knee between Zitao’s. She hooks her fingers through Zitao’s belt loops rolls her hips to rub her thigh up against Zitao’s crotch, drinking in the little moans that spill from Zitao’s mouth into her own, giving her own back when Zitao’s thigh comes up to increase the pressure on Junmyeon’s crotch as she works.

It’s shockingly easy to work Zitao up like this, with the help of groping hands and Junmyeon’s teeth on her neck. The rise and fall of her chest speeds up as her breaths quickly begin to edge on pants, her lips separating from Junmyeon’s in favor of increasing her air flow. 

“Fuck, Unnie,” Zitao gasps when her mouth is no longer occupied with Junmyeon’s. She tightens her hand on Junmyeon’s ass, pulling them even closer together. Her other hand skips up Junmyeon’s waist to her hair, where it clings as Junmyeon kisses down to her collarbone. 

Forgetting about the clusterfuck of a situation they’re in is so much easier when Junmyeon’s got her face buried in Zitao’s neck, where she smells like orange blossoms and tastes like salt, so Junmyeon keeps her face there while they grind until Zitao tenses beneath her and comes with a loud moan of Junmyeon’s name. 

Junmyeon grinds out her own release on Zitao’s thigh before collapsing on top of her, panting.

“That was nice,” Zitao says, curling her arms around Junmyeon’s back. 

Grinning into Zitao’s neck, Junmyeon says, “You say that like we’re done.”

“No,” Zitao protests. “I was just saying that part was nice. We can do more. I’m sure whatever else we do will be nice, too.”

With a wicked grin, Junmyeon finally sits up and tugs Zitao off to the bedroom. “In that case, I vote that ‘whatever else we do’ involves less clothes and more bed.”

 

When she wakes up in the morning nestled against Zitao, Junmyeon feels warm and happy for all of two seconds before the events of the day before come back to her. The thought of leaving the safety of her nest with Zitao to go to a workplace where she’s been threatened by a bigwig makes her curl farther into the blankets and press up against Zitao. 

Even worse, she’ll have to spend the whole day faking smiles and hiding her frustration from small, unhappy children. There have been very few times in her working life that she’s doubted her ability to do that, but today isn’t looking so good.

The room fills with the beep of her alarm while she thinks about it, and Junmyeon wants to throw up. She can’t reach her phone to turn it off without climbing over Zitao, so she lets it ring until Zitao throws out an arm to fumble for it. 

Zitao successfully turns off the alarm, then turns to look at Junmyeon through puffy eyes. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Junmyeon squeaks.

“What’s wrong?” Zitao looks puzzled.

“I don’t want to go to work,” Junmyeon says.

The moment reality sinks back into Zitao’s mind shows on her face, in the sudden tightening of her mouth and eyebrows. 

“Please don’t go to work,” Zitao responds.

It says something about Junmyeon’s state of mind that a single external request is enough to convince her to call in sick, but she just holds out her hand. “Pass me my phone.”

The messages icon on her phone shows seven new messages. She ignores those while she dials in to work.

It’s too early for anyone to be at the clinic yet, so Junmyeon leaves a voicemail and hopes she won’t wake up to an angry phone call in an hour. She feels a pang of guilt at the knowledge that she’s made Jongin’s morning difficult, but otherwise nothing. They’ll get someone to see to the patients, who may or may not be doomed anyway, and the rest of the staff are assholes.

All seven of the texts are from Minseok, six in a group text that also includes Sehun, Yixing, and Zitao. The first in the group text says that she’s going to send pictures of likely suspects from the hospital directory. The next five are those pictures, any of which could be the person they’ve seen in their surveillance photographs.

Given that Zitao has seen the man in person, Junmyeon hopes she’ll be better able to identify him. Unfortunately, Zitao’s eyes have drifted shut again. Nudging her shoulder, Junmyeon passes the phone over. “Any of these look like Prettyface?”

Zitao’s eyes open into tiny, puffy slits. She scrolls through the pictures slowly, pauses on one for a moment, then hands the phone back to Junmyeon. “That’s the one. Kim Jaejoong?”

Junmyeon examines the picture. Kim Jaejoong, it says. Pathology.

“That makes sense,” Junmyeon says. 

“Why?”

“Pathology is where they do autopsies,” Junmyeon says. “He’s probably there to cover their tracks.”

Junmyeon taps out a quick response, _Tao says Kim Jaejoong._

As she hits send, it occurs to her that she’s just told Sehun that she’s spent the night with Zitao. How Sehun will take that is a mystery to her, but she resolves to use her newfound day off to attend to best friend duties.

The last text from Minseok, sent only to Junmyeon, is a request for any thoughts Junmyeon would like to share on the Sehun situation. Junmyeon smiles but shuts off her screen, knowing she’ll need to think through her response.

“Let’s get you some water,” she says, sitting up and looking at Zitao. Those puffy eyelids scream dehydration. “And painkillers? Do you have a headache?”

Zitao nods and follows her to the kitchen. 

 

 

It’s Taemin who lets Junmyeon into the apartment he shares with Jongin, where Sehun is sitting on the couch with a dog in her lap. Two more dogs—toy poodles, she knows from Jongin’s many stories—had followed Taemin to the door and proceed to run around Junmyeon’s feet with frantically wagging tails. Junmyeon pauses to crouch down and coo over them, excited to finally meet the dogs she’s seen in a million pictures.

When she looks back up, Taemin is putting on his coat. He explains that he’s going to lunch with a friend before ducking out the door, and Junmyeon feels a little guilty for exiling him. She hopes it’s at least his day off, and not a day when he’s working a late shift. 

The TV screen shows a paused game of Mario Kart, and there are Wiimotes on the couch. Junmyeon settles next to Sehun on the couch and pets the dog that jumps up to claim her lap.

“Are you okay?” She asks Sehun. 

Sehun purses her lips. “Do you think I’m an asshole?”

Junmyeon shakes her head. “I did the same thing a few weeks ago, didn’t I?”

“Is Tao okay?” 

Junmyeon sighs. “She’s unhappy and scared. Anybody would be.”

Sehun curls against Junmyeon’s shoulder. “I’m scared.”

“We all are,” Junmyeon says. She rubs Sehun’s back, wishing she had some proper epiphany to share that would give them both the solution they need.

Nodding, Sehun sighs. “So Tao’s sure this Jaejoong is our guy?”

“Yes,” Junmyeon says. “Now they’ll just have to get rid of him. And his friends.”

There’s a long silence, then. Junmyeon fights the urge to fill it with meaningless babble, knowing that the super blank look on Sehun’s face that makes her look dumb means that she’s thinking something through. It’ll only frustrate her if Junmyeon disrupts her train of thought.

Eventually, Sehun purses her lips and proves Junmyeon right. “I should go home tonight, then. Tao’s gonna be scared.”

Junmyeon hums. “What about Minseok, though? She might need to come over.”

With a groan, Sehun buries her face in Junmyeon’s shoulder. “Has she talked to you? Is she mad?”

“We haven’t really talked,” Junmyeon says. “I don’t think she’s angry.”

Sehun’s only response is a weird grumble into Junmyeon’s shoulder. With a sympathetic pat to the back, Junmyeon asks if she can take over Taemin’s spot in Mario Kart.

 

 

When she returns to the apartment—sans Sehun, who said she’d promised to hang out with Jongin for a bit when she got home from work—Junmyeon finds herself at a loss. Tao is out tracking demons, and there’s not much else to be done. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to watch TV or read a book when everyone else is out stressing.

Deciding it’s time to see what the internet has to say about demons, Junmyeon opens her computer and gets Googling. She keeps an eye on the surveillance program as she does, in case any new faces appear. 

Unfortunately, it turns out that Googling ‘demons’ is unhelpful. Adding in ‘hypnosis’ narrows down the results from eighty million too vague to consider to somewhat more specific results.

The first few results are YouTube videos. One is titled _Demonic Hypnosis_ , with Google providing the beginning of the description, _Because everyone needs to be bad sometimes to understand good…_

Junmyeon stares at it in confusion for a few minutes, afraid to actually click the link but morbidly curious about the contents. The chance that it’s got any helpful information is clearly zero, though, so she looks past it.

The next one seems to be from Satanists, with _Demonic Enlightenment_ for a title and a description laden with the same sorts of promises given by Christian pastors, and the third is a video titled _Hypnosis is a Tool of the Devil_. Before Junmyeon can even start to think that video is on to something, she sees the description: _Therapists suggest hypnosis to trick patients into committing horrific…_

With a sigh, she scrolls past that, then someone’s erotic fiction. She’s about ready to give up when she reaches the end of the first page and only sees similar results, over and over, but she decides to go for less popular results first.

Page seven gives her one link, _How to protect yourself from a demon’s hypnosis_ from a website with the domain _demonwatch.com_. Feeling only slightly ridiculous, Junmyeon clicks on it to find a webpage with lilac background and the barebones, clunky organization of a site from the late nineteen-nineties. The header is a darker purple, and ‘demon watch’ is written at the top, stylized so that the m and w are both sets of eyes and the t is a cross. It looks like it was designed by a twelve-year-old.

The page contains a list of tips, most of which read like rape avoidance tips given to girls starting college. _Use the buddy system!_ and _Don’t drink too much! It’s easier to hypnotize a drunk mind than a sober one._ are high on the list. Junmyeon wonders if she’s found Minseok’s former cult.

Farther down, though, the advice gets less generic. _Make yourself uncomfortable! Some like to carry a sharp talisman to keep themselves grounded, which may be safer than biting your cheek. Pain and other strong emotions, barring panic, make it hard for a demon to invade your mind._

That one makes her more inclined to believe this page, because it’s advice she’s heard before.

_Don’t panic. Panicking can make you’re mind a blank slate for demons._

There’s a link in the navigation box on the side that says, _About Demons_ , so Junmyeon clicks on that one when she gets through the list. It turns out to be a long-winded description that boils down to what Lu Han had told Junmyeon about Minseok’s former cult’s beliefs, in sum _Demons are Satan’s trap for unrepentant sinners, but hey, we’re nice and want you to have a chance to repent so we hunt them for you._

Okay, then. 

Just as she decides to write the website off as useless and head back to Google, an error message pops up on the computer screen.

_Discovery Error: Unable to locate CAN0520. Please check that the device is turned on and try again._

Junmyeon’s fairly certain that CAN0520 is the name of the surveillance camera. She snaps a picture of the message with her phone before she clicks “OK” and goes back to the surveillance photos. Maybe it’s run out of battery, she thinks.

But when she clicks through the last several pictures, she’s increasingly certain that she’s wrong. They’re confusing and odd, mostly a jumble of blurry shots of what appear to be walls, the ground. The next most recent after that is a close-up of someone’s coat, then finally a shot from where they’d put the camera, with a gloved hand extending in front of it.

Previous shots show someone coming out of the house, face obscured by a hat and scarf and approaching the camera.

Junmyeon’s about to text the whole group when she has second thoughts—it would be incriminating, if anyone decided to go the legal route. She deletes the picture of the error message from her phone, hoping that’ll be enough, and then she calls Minseok to tell her about her discovery.

“We’re fucked,” Minseok curses. 

They fall silent for a moment, but then Minseok follows up with, “By the way, can you give me Jongin’s address? Please?”

The sudden change of topic from ‘things that might kill us all in the near term’ to ‘girlfriend problems’ leaves Junmyeon’s head spinning for a moment. When she can get her mouth to work properly, she smiles and says, “Just ask Sehun.”


	9. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 8 warning: There are people dealing with serious injuries in this chapter. If you need any specifics before you read on, feel free to ask me! I don’t want to spoil anyone. 
> 
> Note! This is chapter 2/3 of a triple update. If the last time you read any of this was Thursday, you'll want to start with the previous chapter.

Red Velvet’s _Ice Cream Cake_ jars Junmyeon out of an impromptu nap on the kitchen table. It’s Sehun’s ringtone, but Sehun prefers texting over phone calls so religiously that it takes a moment for Junmyeon to remember she’d ever used the song for a ringtone. When she does, she grabs the phone.

“Unnie, it’s—,“ Words spill through the phone, then pause. Sehun’s voice is shaking, “Minseok and Jongin— I need you to come here.”

The words are too jumbled to make any sense, but at the same time, they do. Junmyeon’s heart drops to her feet.

“Where is here?”

“The hospital,” Sehun says. Her voice catches on a sob, and she has to pause again for a moment. “Your hospital. Well, not your hospital. Seungyeon-unnie’s hospital. We…there was an accident. A car.”

“I’ll be right there,” Junmyeon says. “You can tell me when I get there. You’re in the emergency room?”

She’s on her feet as she speaks, grabbing her coat. Her identification badge for work dangles from a lanyard on the coat tree, and she takes that as well. Then she’s off at a run, calling her sister as she goes.

The phone rings, rings, goes to voicemail. 

“It’s Junmyeon. Call me back when you can,” Junmyeon says, figuring her labored breathing will lend some urgency to the call. She hopes Seungyeon is just in surgery or on a date and not dead.

Following that, she calls Zitao. That call goes straight to voicemail, and Junmyeon guesses she’s already heard. She leaves a brief message anyway, just to be sure. 

She finds Sehun sitting in the waiting room with Taemin, both quiet and staring blankly at the wall.

“We went to dinner, all four of us,” Sehun says. She sniffles. “Jongin wanted to meet Minseok. A car came out of nowhere when we were leaving, and—“

She freezes up with her mouth open, leaving the sentence unfinished. Junmyeon drops into the chair next to her to give her an awkward, sideways hug. 

“How bad is it?” She asks.

Sehun just sobs, so Taemin answers instead. “We’re waiting to hear. Jongin has a broken leg, at least, and some lacerations. Minseok wasn’t conscious.”

“Is she still unconscious? How long has it been?”

“She is,” Taemin says. “It’s been almost thirty minutes.”

Junmyeon frowns. She wants to talk to the doctors, but she knows they’re still evaluating, that there’s only so much they can do so quickly.

“What about their families?” She asks.

Sehun stills and tenses under her arm.

“Both are on their way.”

The reaction from Sehun gives her pause. “Have you met Minseok’s family yet, Sehunnie?”

Shaking her head, Sehun sucks in a breath. “They know she’s got a girlfriend. She was waiting for me to decide if I wanted them to know up front that I’m trans or risk them figuring out on their own.”

Junmyeon holds Sehun closer. Dealing with one closet is hard enough for Junmyeon, but Sehun has two closets. That one of them leaves her feeling more invalidated upon coming out than staying in is something that took Junmyeon a while to grasp.

“What about the driver?” Junmyeon asks, after a long moment.

“Hit and run,” Taemin supplies. “The police will be here soon.”

A thought starts to work its way into Junmyeon’s head, but it’s interrupted by a call from Seungyeon. “Junmyeonie? I got your message. What’s wrong?”

Something about hearing her older sister’s voice makes Junmyeon start to tear up immediately, like a kid when her mother comes to the rescue after a fall. She pinches her eyes shut until the urge goes away, then speaks. “Sehun’s girlfriend and Jongin were hit by a car. They’re in the emergency room.”

“Here?” Seungyeon asks. “I’ll be right over. I just left surgery. How are they?”

“We’re waiting to hear,” Junmyeon says. She wants to say that it sounds like Minseok has traumatic brain injury, but she doesn’t want to scare Sehun. It’s one of the more common injuries from accidents involving pedestrians and motor vehicles, so Seungyeon can probably guess. “Minseok’s not conscious, as far as we know.”

A nurse comes out to tell them that they can all see Jongin, now, and they follow the nurse in a numb sort of haze to where Jongin is lying in a bed, with a leg brace and bandages everywhere, looking drugged and uncomfortable. She smiles at them, then grimaces.

“How are you doing?” Sehun asks. Taemin is white as a sheet beside her, curling a hand around Jongin’s.

“Been better,” Jongin croaks. “Minseok?”

“We’re going to need to do some imaging,” the nurse says. “On Jongin, I mean. She doesn’t seem to have any critical injuries. Minseok should be coming out of her CT scan shortly.”

She addresses the last comment to Jongin, with a pat to the shoulder, then leaves them.

Seungyeon and another doctor come in at the same time, moments later. The male doctor bows, gives Seungyeon a quizzical look. 

“Jongin and Minseok are family friends,” Seungyeon explains. She gestures to Junmyeon. “Jongin and my sister both work in the clinic.”

Nodding, the doctor gives them a description of the injuries. Each word rattles around in Junmyeon’s skull: _intracerebral hematoma_ , _intracranial pressure_. They’ll be taking her to surgery immediately. 

Wordlessly, Junmyeon turns to Seungyeon. She doesn’t want to ask, but she doesn’t want to not ask. The surgeries Seungyeon performs are often long; she’s probably exhausted from the one she just finished. In any other circumstances, Junmyeon would trust the hospital’s decision about the doctors, and she knows the ambulance brought Minseok here because it’s a trauma center.

But her fears are underscored when a male nurse walks in to say that Minseok is being moved to the operating room and ask if the doctor is ready. The voice is familiar, and when he turns around, it’s Kim Junsu.

Junmyeon can feel whatever blood was left in her face drain out of it. Cold fury boils up in her stomach her suspicions are all but confirmed.

This wasn’t an accident. She’s thought so since Sehun’s phone call, but she’s been squelching the idea as much as she can. But Kim Junsu’s presence makes it far too easy to connect the dots in a way that makes it worse than she was thinking.

Because all she was thinking was that this was an attempt to scare them off. Someone must have connected Minseok or Sehun to Junmyeon and Zitao and attacked them to drive a message home. 

But this is more than that. Minseok, right now, is unconscious and about to undergo emergency surgery for an injury that has a high mortality rate. Even if she makes it through the surgery, she’ll be in the ICU for a long time, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she were to die there. 

And Kim Junsu will have free reign to drop by and visit without raising any eyebrows. Even if he’s not assigned to Minseok, it’s not unusual for nurses to drop by a patient’s bedside for a greeting when they have a moment. If Minseok were to go into cardiac arrest while a friendly nurse was in the room, nobody would suspect a thing.

That’s a worry for later, though, so she files it away. Right now, her priority is keeping Kim Junsu away from Minseok, but how to do that without looking like a lunatic?

She gets a break in the form of Sehun running out of Jongin’s room after Junsu as he leaves. Whether it’s because she wants a glimpse of Minseok or because she’s recognized Junsu’s face is impossible to determine, but it gives Junmyeon the chance she needs to speak to her sister alone.

Taemin and the doctor both run out after Sehun, probably to make sure she isn’t causing a scene, and Junmyeon is left with Seungyeon and Jongin in an otherwise empty room. 

“Unnie, I don’t want to say this, but I’m really not comfortable with Kim Junsu being in Minseok’s operating room.”

“Why?” Seungyeon asks, looking surprised. 

“Remember when you asked if something happened?” Junmyeon asks, desperate. “At the clinic. I didn’t want to tell you, but a bunch of the staff started bullying me after I came out. He’s one of them.”

Playing the victim card makes her feel slimy, and so does the risk that Seungyeon will doubt her assertion about bullying. It’s a funny thing about heterosexual people that they’re all too willing to rationalize away homophobia on the part of third parties, determined to believe that it was all a misunderstanding. It wouldn’t be the first time Seungyeon was skeptical for no reason. Nobody wants to know just how mean people are, Junmyeon supposes. 

Fortunately, Seungyeon’s lips press into a thin line. “Yes, I’ve heard some rumors. I’ll tell them you asked me to do the surgery, and I’ll request a switch in trauma nurses.”

Junmyeon throws her arms around Seungyeon’s shoulders. “Thank you.”

Seungyeon gives her a tight squeeze before pulling away. “Just be glad I’m not normally a prima donna. The nurses are all so fed up with Changmin’s staff requests that they’ve made a game of coming up with excuses to ignore them. If he weren’t friends with Park he might even be in deep shit about it. He’s not a good enough surgeon to make up for the drama he causes.”

If anything, that just makes Junmyeon want to frown harder. Instead she forces a smile and nudges her sister toward the door. “I’ll pay for our dinners for the next year, I promise.” 

She follows Seungyeon out into the hall to see her run after the mess of people around a gurney making their way down the hall, with Taemin gently holding Sehun back from following. 

“Kim Junsu,” she shouts down the hall, channeling every angry auntie she’s ever heard in a desperate bid to distract him from attempting to hypnotize her sister into forgetting her promise. “You’re not even going to greet Jongin? Your own colleague has just been through a horrible accident, and you can’t even be bothered to say hello when you’re right next to her bed?”

People are staring. Mostly they’re staring at Junmyeon, presumably thinking she’s lost her mind, but she can’t help but hope that maybe they’ll be left with a lingering inkling that Kim Junsu is an asshole. At the very least, she tells herself that she might make Seungyeon uncomfortable enough to avoid hypnosis.

Sure enough, Junsu breaks away from the crowd of people to come toward her, after a gesture and a quick word from Seungyeon, who smiles the inoffensive smile of a woman who doesn’t mean any harm, really.

Junsu smiles a placating smile, ducks his head. “I didn’t even realize she was in here!”

Following Junmyeon back into the hospital room, Junsu waves at Jongin. “Hi, Jonginnie.”

Jongin turns to glare at him. “Go fuck yourself.”

It’s the angriest Junmyeon has ever heard Jongin. Even Taemin and Sehun are staring at her, open-mouthed, and Junsu looks similarly shocked.

Giggling nervously, he says, “Is that any way to greet your senior, Jonginnie?”

“Fuck off,” Jongin repeats herself. “I don’t like you. You know I know you’ve been an asshole to Junmyeon-unnie.”

There’s no pull on her consciousness, trying to sway her. It makes her doubt their convictions about him for a moment, but maybe there are too many strong emotions in the room for his hypnosis to work. She wonders if it can be targeted or not.

It occurs to her, oddly, the gravity of this standoff. If Zitao gets to Junsu, he’s dead. Do demons have souls? Do they continue on in some way after being turned into that lump of crumbly gray dust? She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know if _they_ know. 

That means that this nurse in front of her, looking nothing more than slightly confused, is most likely afraid for his life. But he’s somehow connected to a group of people who’ve tried to kill her friends, one of whom knows nothing about what’s going on. She doesn’t have much sympathy to muster for him.

Junsu stands there for a moment longer, smiling quizzically, before he shrugs and backs out of the room. A disgruntled grunt comes from Sehun’s throat, and she makes to chase after him again. Junmyeon blocks her with an arm around the waist.

“Hunnie, I got Seungyeon to take over the surgery and request a different nurse,” she says. “He’s not going in there.”

At that, all the air seems to go out of Sehun. 

“Will Minseok be okay?” She asks, quietly.

Junmyeon sighs, knowing that she can’t sugarcoat anything. “She might, but there’s a good chance that she won’t. If she makes it through this surgery, she might never wake up, or she might be disabled.”

Saying nothing, Sehun drops into a chair. Her lips are drawn into a tight, tiny line, and she stares blankly ahead of herself.

Junmyeon wishes she could assure Sehun that it would all be okay, but she knows it may not. It sucks, a million times over.

“Did you call Tao?” She asks instead.

“Yeah. I just got voicemail when I did,” Sehun says. “Fuck, I hope she’s—“

She seems to catch herself, then. They’re in a room with Jongin and Taemin, so talking about demons is out. Implying that this was a deliberate attack would only alarm them further, even if keeping it secret is killing Junmyeon with guilt. 

Jongin’s family rushes into the room, then, and Junmyeon and Sehun step out to the waiting room to give them some space. Junmyeon doesn’t know what Minseok’s family looks like, but she scans the clumps of people for anyone with a stocky build similar to Minseok’s, maybe with a pointy chin and delicate mouth. She comes up empty. 

Grabbing her phone, Junmyeon dials Zitao again. She ducks toward the doors, away from the bulk of the waiting room crowd. This time, Zitao picks up on the first ring. 

“Unnie, I’m on my way. Are they okay?”

Junmyeon gives her a quick rundown, mentions Junsu as quietly as she can.

“I’m not sure you should come,” she adds. She’s been wondering if this is a trap for Zitao—exhaust her with worry for her friends, and then taker her down when she’s weak. 

“I can’t not,” Zitao says. “Anyway, I called Krystal, and she said her friend is in the hospital? So she’ll be there for a bit, too.”

“Did you tell Yixing?” Junmyeon asks.

“Not yet. Can you?”

Yixing is quiet for a moment when Junmyeon passes on the news.

“Where were they when it happened?”

Junmyeon gives the nearest intersection, then clarifies with a neighborhood when Yixing doesn’t recognize the names.

Yixing grunts, “That could have been Park. I saw him leave the hospital earlier today, but he got in his car and drove off. I didn’t want to spook him by following. You said Minseok is in surgery, right? I’m still close. I’ll be right there.”

“Is that a good idea?” Junmyeon asks. Her phone dings with a text message, which she ignores for the moment.

“She’s my friend,” Yixing says. “I’ll just have to be extra careful leaving the hospital. They can hardly do anything to me while I’m inside. That only works with patients in poor condition, not healthy visitors.”

There is logic in that. Junmyeon sighs.

When she hangs up the phone, she flips to the text messages and sees one from Seungyeon, and she must be overextended, because she doesn’t get the urge to vomit when she reads it.

While it’s not unheard of for a surgeon to take urgent calls during a surgery, an unsolicited text message from someone performing emergency surgery on an immediately life-threatening injury is rare. It’s far more likely that someone took Seungyeon’s phone while she was focused on surgery and found Junmyeon’s contact in it.

The message reads, _You were warned_

 

Back in the lobby, she finds two police officers sitting with Sehun, taking notes. Taking the seat on Sehun’s opposite side, Junmyeon rests a shaking hand on her shoulder for moral support while she listens to Sehun repeat the full story. The police have to wait patiently for Sehun to collect herself several times, but they’re polite about it. One even produces a pack of tissues.

When they’ve finally finished, and the police have gone to find Taemin and Jongin, a short young woman approaches Sehun and Junmyeon. She has plump cheeks and smallish eyes, and she’s wearing a white blouse tucked into a beige skirt, topped with a pastel pink cardigan and matching pink pumps. Either an office worker or a housewife who needed to dress nicely for something today—maybe a PTA meeting—Junmyeon guesses, idly. Either way, the tilt of her eyes reminds Junmyeon of someone else.

Bowing uncertainly, the woman addresses Sehun, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but overhear them calling you Sehun…”

Sehun nods, but her mouth stays pinched in a tiny straight line.

Undaunted, the woman continues. “Sehun as in the one who’s dating Kim Minseok?”

“That’s me,” Sehun says.

The woman’s lips press into a tiny smile, then. It’s not a particularly happy smile, but happy smiles are rare in the emergency room.

“I’m her sister, Minjung,” the woman says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Mustering something close to a smile, Sehun nods back. “I- it’s nice to meet you. I guess. Um.”

She looks around the room, clearly not sure what to say when meeting her girlfriend’s sister for the first time while the girlfriend in question is in the middle of emergency surgery and may die. The rules of etiquette only cover so much, and even Junmyeon feels out of her depth here.

Fortunately, Minjung doesn’t seem offended. She turns her attention to Junmyeon, who takes that as a hint to introduce herself.

“I’m Kim Junmyeon,” she says. “Sehun’s roommate. My sister is the doctor performing Minseok’s surgery.”

“I see,” Minjung says. They all fall into a silence, then, uncomfortable only for the situation they’re all in. Minjung doesn’t ask questions, and Junmyeon wonders if she understands the situation well or simply shares her sister’s quiet nature.

“Are your parents here?” Junmyeon asks.

“Not yet,” Minjung replies. “They live pretty far out in the suburbs.”

After what seems to be a century of stiff conversation filled with long silences when one of them gets too distracted by the situation to continue, Zitao arrives with another tall woman in tow, with Yixing and Lu Han on their heels. What follows is a mess of introductions and reunions and trying to sort people out; it turns out that Yixing and Lu Han are acquainted with Minseok’s family, and the tall woman was Krystal, who’s a close friend of Jongin and Taemin—and therefore, unsurprisingly, an acquaintance of Sehun—on top of being Zitao’s coworker. Her eyes widen when it comes out that Jongin and Minseok were injured in the same accident. 

By the time the entire tangle of who knows who has been sorted through, and Krystal has gone to check in on Jongin, Minseok’s parents have arrived. Thus begins another round of introductions, and Junmyeon ends up explaining Minseok’s worst injury and the surgery Seungyeon is performing as they speak. 

Sehun sticks around through introductions to Minseok’s family, but she sneaks away to visit Jongin again when silence falls over them all. Junmyeon follows her, slipping her hand into Zitao’s and tugging her along.

The hand in Junmyeon’s shockingly doesn’t slip out of her grasp, and Junmyeon is grateful. There’s no point in hiding their relationship now, she figures. If Director Park and company have figured out Sehun’s connection to Junmyeon and Zitao, they’ve been paying too much attention.

When they’ve got a minute in the hallway, Junmyeon slips out her phone and shows Zitao the text she’d received from Junmyeon’s phone. For the first time since she received it, Junmyeon has had a moment to think about it. She doesn’t like where that thought goes.

“Seungyeon is in surgery right now,” Junmyeon murmurs. “She’ll go home when she’s done. I don’t know how to stop her.”

Zitao groans and presses her hands to her eyes.

“Let me say hi to Jongin and grab Krystal,” she says. “Can you get Yixing and maybe Lu Han? Where can we talk?” 

“Ladies’ room?” Junmyeon whispers, after racking her brain. All the demons they can think of are decidedly male-presenting.

“That works,” Zitao says. “Don’t be obvious about it.”

Junmyeon nods and goes back to the waiting room, where everyone seems to have fallen into tense silence. There’s a small gap between Minseok’s family and Lu Han and Yixing, so Junmyeon sits in the chair on the opposite side of Yixing from the family and murmurs the information in her ear, then more loudly says she’s going to get coffee from the vending machine and asks if either of them want some.

 

 

They find Zitao, Sehun, and Krystal all gathered in the bathroom. After a quick double check that the stalls are empty, Zitao leans up against the door to keep anyone else from walking in. Briefing is blissfully quick, as everyone involved is aware of the state of their knowledge up to the evening before. Junmyeon lifts an eyebrow when she hears that Lu Han knows, but Lu Han just points to Yixing. 

“So as soon as Seungyeon comes out of surgery, she’ll go home,” Krystal says. “And she’ll be exhausted, you said? That’s bad.”

“The only way I can think of to keep her here would be for her to borrow a resident’s bed. Even if she did, we could hardly keep an eye on her,” Junmyeon responds.

“It would be hard to explain a bodyguard,” Zitao adds.

“Would it be easier to take out the threats than keep her safe?” Yixing asks. “Even if she gets home safely, we can’t keep an eye on her forever.”

“All of them?” Zitao asks, frowning. “We have three hunters. There are at least four targets. We technically haven’t even confirmed that they’re demons.”

“We’re sure of Park, aren’t we?” Junmyeon supplies. “He hypnotized Seungyeon, and I can’t imagine why else he’d be openly threatening me.”

“Okay,” Yixing says. “We’re sure of Director Park. And Zitao’s sure of this Kim Jaejoong. Would focusing on those two be enough?”

“It might scare the other two into hiding,” Krystal suggests. “That’s not ideal, but it would remove the immediate threat to Junmyeon’s sister and any hunters’ friends in the hospital.”

Junmyeon nods but frowns. “Changmin is another neurosurgeon, though. My sister doesn’t like him, but we can’t keep him away from her if he doesn’t run. And how do we find Jaejoong, if he’s not on shift?”

Krystal bites her lip. “Let me get Taemin in here.”

The rapid discussion leaves her head spinning, so Junmyeon props herself against the wall while Krystal texts Taemin. Fortunately, it turns out that Taemin learned about the demon business while helping Krystal through a fight-induced injury. 

“How long will this surgery take?” Yixing asks while they wait.

“Probably a few more hours,” Junmyeon says, trying to remember what time they took Minseok in and what time it is now. “But it could be as little as one.”

For Minseok’s sake, she hopes it’s only one. An uncomplicated surgery would be best. But at the same time, she can’t imagine that an hour is long enough for three hunters to safely take out two demons.

“Not long, then,” Yixing grimaces. “Park’s car is at the hospital, so at least he might be here.”

“Fuck,” Junmyeon says, having an uncomfortable thought. “It’s going to be super suspicious when four of the hospital’s staff disappear around the same time.”

Everyone in the room grimaces. 

“We need to be careful not to be seen with these people,” Zitao says. “I mean, more than usual. That’s tough.”

Taemin comes in, then, poking his head tentatively around the door when Zitao opens it, then dashing inside and slamming the door shut again. His look of terror makes them all choke out desperate laughs. 

As it turns out, he does know Jaejoong, says that he’s famous for preferring night shifts. For a twelve-hour shift, that means he may very well be here. Krystal agrees to scope out the morgue while Yixing borrows Junmyeon’s badge and a lab coat Lu Han produces from a tote bag. It’s mysteriously wrinkle-free, is Junmyeon’s first thought as Lu Han folds up the plastic dry cleaning bag it had been wrapped in and stows it back in the tote.

Then she raises an eyebrow when Yixing slips the coat on. Embroidered on the breast is _Haesung Hospital_ , the proper logo and all. 

“I have a friend who used to work here,” Lu Han explains. “Got this when she was paring down her stuff to move to China.”

 

Thirty minutes later, Junmyeon is sitting in the waiting room again, twisting her hands. The only good thing about her location is that everyone in an ER waiting room is some form of tense, always. She’d kissed Zitao goodbye when she’d decided to play backup for Yixing, terrified but aware that Yixing needed the help. Then she’d come back to the waiting room with Sehun and Lu Han, Taemin drifting back to Jongin’s bedside. As much as she’d prefer to keep Jongin company over hanging around in the waiting room, the need to know exactly when Minseok’s surgery finishes is too real. If Zitao isn’t back, Junmyeon and the others will have to try to stall Seungyeon as much as possible.

Outside, the world has long gone dark. Everyone outside of the hospital world not stuck working overtime is going to bed, or out drinking, or knowingly losing sleep, maybe to play video games or fuck.

Junmyeon tries not to think too hard about the bandages covering large amounts of Zitao’s torso and arm, or the stitches on her calf, and how she’s supposed to fight demons when she’s already full of holes.

Next to her, Sehun is quiet but alert, staring at the clock on the wall. Lu Han is frowning.

Krystal comes back to the waiting room first.

“How was Dr. Kim?” Lu Han asks, like Krystal is just back from visiting a friend.

“Couldn’t find him,” Krystal says ruefully. “I guess he wasn’t working today, after all.”

Then she goes back to visit Jongin again, briefly. Jongin is discharged shortly afterward, wheeled out on a wheelchair with Taemin at the handles and her family following.

“I’m gonna go home to my family for a few days,” Jongin says when Junmyeon and Sehun walk up to give her greetings. “You’re just going to keep calling in sick until the end of your notice period, aren’t you, Unnie?”

Feeling guilty once again for how entangled Jongin has become in problems she doesn’t know anything about (as certified by Taemin and Krystal, when Junmyeon had asked in the bathroom), Junmyeon nods. 

Krystal follows them out like she’s heading home, but not before murmuring to Junmyeon that she’ll be waiting outside to follow Seungyeon home, since Jaejoong is still a threat. She passes Junmyeon a phone number written on a piece of paper towel from the bathroom.

Then they’re back to interminable waiting, watching clocks, sitting up straighter every time the doors open from the operating area only to slouch back down again every time it’s not Seungyeon, doing something similar every time any other door opens to produce someone other than Yixing and Zitao. As the local experts at staying awake for days at a time, Junmyeon and Lu Han take turns making trips to the vending machine for coffee.

Finally the doors open to Seungyeon, flanked by her assistant. She looks tiny and exhausted in her scrubs, and Junmyeon herself knows the feeling too well to try to read anything about the surgery in her face. They all flock over before any names can be called, Lu Han and the Kim family catching on when Junmyeon and Sehun get up. 

“The surgery went well,” Seungyeon says. “We were able to clear the hemorrhage. Her intracranial pressure is okay for now.”

The Kim family members all stare at Seungyeon like she’s speaking Greek. 

“Sorry,” Minjung giggles sadly. “Usually it’s Minseok who interprets these things for us. Is she going to be okay?”

Seungyeon and Junmyeon’s lips both pinch at the same time. Even as she desperately wants to know the answer, Junmyeon doesn’t know how Seungyeon deals with this kind of question every day. So many problems with the brain boil down to, _We don’t know what’s going to happen. Sorry._

“We won’t know how this will affect her until she wakes up,” Seungyeon says. “We can take images and make some guesses, but the brain works in mysterious ways.”

There’s quiet for a moment as the family digests this.

“Can we see her?” Sehun asks.

Nodding, Seungyeon leads them to the recovery room. Minseok lies on a bed, covered in tubes and wires that Junmyeon can name but doesn’t particularly want to. There are nurses taking notes around them, double checking medications and vital signs. The monitors beep their steady, obnoxious beeps, and Junmyeon reassures herself that at the very least, the vital signs on the screen are in the right range for someone just out of surgery.

The Kim family rushes to the bedside, Sehun hanging back like she’s not sure what to do until Minjung looks up and waves her over. 

Junmyeon stands back by the wall with Lu Han and Seungyeon.

“Thank you,” she says to her sister. 

Seungyeon nods, rubbing her eyes, and Junmyeon raises her half-full coffee cup. 

“Want the rest of this?” She asks.

Shaking her head, Seungyeon keeps her voice low enough not to catch the family’s attention. “I’ll stay a little longer, but then I need to pass out.”

They stand silently for a moment, watching the people around the bed. It occurs to Junmyeon belatedly that she should have informed Jongdae about Minseok’s condition long ago, so she shoots off a quick text. 

After a few more moments, Junmyeon introduces Lu Han to Seungyeon as a colleague at her new workplace.

“So is the bullying the reason you’re leaving?” Seungyeon asks. 

It’s a little oblivious to bring that up in front of a new colleague, but Junmyeon knows that Seungyeon’s brain is probably beyond done for the day. Junmyeon just nods, and they fall silent again.

Eventually Zitao ducks in, looking white as a sheet. She tucks up against Junmyeon’s side, practically swaying on her feet.

“How’d it go?” Junmyeon murmurs, trying not to attract Seungyeon’s attention.

“Fine,” Zitao says. 

“Where’s Yixing?” Junmyeon asks in a more normal voice, so that Lu Han looks up. As a side effect, Seungyeon looks up as well, smiling when she spots Zitao.

“She’ll be here soon,” Zitao says. “She went to grab some food.”

Hoping that’s not code for having needed medical attention, Junmyeon helps Zitao over to a seat. They can move onto the floor if any members of the Kim family decide they want to sit down, she figures, or obtain more chairs. 

“Hi, Zitao,” Seungyeon says. “Are you okay? You look wan. And we missed you at Seollal.”

Gesturing at the bed, Zitao takes a moment to collect her thoughts before answering, “I’m just worried. I went home to visit my family for Seollal.”

Seungyeon nods, swaying on her feet. She decides it’s time for her to go home, then, encouraging Junmyeon to call her if Minseok needs her attention.

“I’m serious. The guy on call tonight is okay, but tomorrow it’s Changmin,” she whispers in Junmyeon’s ear before she leaves. “I’ve got a way better track record than Changmin.”

With a quick nod and a smile, Junmyeon waits until Seungyeon is gone before whispering that bit of news in Zitao’s ear. Zitao bites her lip and nods. 

Shortly thereafter, Yixing really does appear with several bags of McDonald’s French fries in hand, which she promptly passes out to everyone with her dimple visible. She looks tired, but not as drained as Zitao. 

Somewhere in the back of Junmyeon’s mind, it registers as odd to be eating French fries as she sits in a hospital room, waiting to see if a friend will wake up following a life-threatening injury, in the company of her girlfriend and another acquaintance who probably just killed the hospital’s director.

Then everyone around the bed startles, and Junmyeon is conveniently distracted from the impending panic.

There’s a clamor of questions directed at Minseok by everyone around the bed, so Junmyeon edges up to see Minseok’s eyes cracked open and flitting around the room, clearly alarmed.

“Why am I in a hospital?” Is the first thing she asks, voice coming out raspy and slightly slurred, followed quickly by, “Why are there French fries in the hospital?”

Rather than risk stepping on the toes of the hospital staff by attempting any evaluation herself, Junmyeon presses the nurse call button while she joins the mob of crying people around the bed. Her own eyes are misty, out of a combination of relief and stress and exhaustion from worrying. It’s barely after midnight, but Junmyeon feels like she’s been awake for more than twenty-four hours. 

The nurse comes and goes, and Junmyeon compares her actions to her own mental checklist. Pupil size, check; limb movement, check; GCS, check; respiratory rate, vital signs, etc.—check. She has some weakness on the left side, but otherwise Minseok is nearly miraculously okay.

What follows that is more people sorting. Junmyeon starts to feel for Zitao and her years’ worth of secret-keeping while she and Lu Han, Junmyeon, Yixing, and Sehun try to work out what to do from here without Minseok’s family catching on. 

 

In her apartment that night, Junmyeon checks Zitao’s stitches while Lu Han showers, having taken them up on their offer to stay over rather than go to her own home. Sehun and Yixing had remained at the hospital, the latter to keep any demons away from Minseok and the former because she refuses to leave Minseok’s side.

None of the stitches are torn, fortunately, but new bruises are creeping in next to the ones that are slowly yellowing. Clicking her tongue, Junmyeon drops Zitao’s shirt only to pull her into a tight hug, rocking her back and forth gently for a moment.

As much as Junmyeon wants to know what happened with Director Park, she wants to sleep more. She gets Zitao into the shower with her once Lu Han is settled on the couch, and they clean up quickly and quietly before stumbling into bed.


	10. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter! If you're just hopping on for today, go back to Chapter 7 (/chapter 8 by AO3's index because I messed everything up by having a prologue.)

All of them wake long before any of them want to, fueled by guilt at leaving Yixing and Sehun to hold down the fort. They talk quietly while Junmyeon makes a quick pot of coffee to pour into travel mugs. 

“You’re one down, three to go, then?” Lu Han asks Zitao, speaking Korean for Junmyeon’s sake.

Zitao nods. “I wish we could take it slower. Last night was messy. Too much of that, and I might be arrested.”

Pursing her lips, Lu Han nods. “We should be careful about discussing things at the hospital. If anyone were to bug the room, they could easily get police support for a missing hospital director.”

“That’ll make it hard to keep an eye on Minseok,” Zitao says. “But you’re right.”

When the coffee is made and Junmyeon has packed changes of clothes for Sehun, Yixing, and Minseok, they go their separate ways, Lu Han to work while Zitao and Junmyeon go to Minseok’s hospital room to give Sehun and Yixing a rest. 

Zitao herself is wearing unusually sober clothes, black track pants that must belong to Sehun coupled with a gray long-sleeved T-shirt and a fitted gray sweatshirt that’s not at all warm enough for the weather. It’s disconcerting to Junmyeon, who’s used to seeing Zitao in the most flamboyant clothes she can find. 

In the hospital, they find Minseok talking softly with Yixing while Sehun sleeps tucked on the broad, cushioned bench by the window that was clearly designed to double as a bed for tired friends and family. 

“How’s it going?” Junmyeon asks. 

Minseok groans. “I don’t know what’s worse: the boredom, all the beeping noises, or the weakness on my left side.”

Her speech still comes out a little bit slurred but easily intelligible. She doesn’t complain about her shaved head, which will probably look weirder when the bandages come off. 

“I heard something weird, by the way,” she says. “Did you know the hospital’s CFO went missing a few weeks ago? His name was Jung.”

“Hhhhhuh,” Junmyeon says, remembering Lu Han’s concern about bugs halfway through the word and dragging it out as she tries to make it sound less excited. She shouldn’t sound unduly interested. “I hadn’t heard, but I don’t pay much attention to the hospital gossip.”

In truth she’s an incorrigible gossip, but by the time Zitao had killed Jung Yunho, Junmyeon’s coworkers were already shunning her. She’s been out of the hospital gossip loop for months, aside from what little Jongin has shared with her.

Sehun stirs on the bench and sits up, rubbing her eyes. “Myeonnie? Tao? Is it that late?”

Minseok smiles fondly at her. “You fell asleep for a while. We didn’t want to wake you.”

With a nod, Sehun stretches her arms and then gets up to stretch the rest of herself. Junmyeon passes her the bag with her clothes and a few toiletries. “I brought you a toothbrush.”

Sehun accepts them gratefully and leaves to change her clothes while Junmyeon passes a similar bag to Yixing. “I figured you’re about my size, so I brought some spare sweats.”

Yixing thanks her but waves it off. “I’m going to get some sleep now that you’re here. We can’t do what we need to do in the middle of the morning.”

Nodding, Junmyeon passes on Lu Han’s advice about keeping their conversations outside. Yixing presses her lips together thoughtfully. “That makes sense. Taozi, can you meet me outside for a moment?”

“Um,” Zitao says. She looks around the room, at Junmyeon and Minseok, hesitating. “I don’t want to leave them alone.”

“What are they going to do this early in the morning?” Junmyeon asks. “There are a million people here who’d notice if something happened. Minseok’s family will be here soon, too.”

Zitao sighs and capitulates, says to Yixing in Chinese something that Junmyeon interprets to mean, “Let’s be quick.”

They disappear out the doors together, and Junmyeon takes a seat next to Minseok’s bed. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Some,” Minseok says. “Things keep hurting. Other things keep beeping. It makes it hard to sleep.”

“Did anything weird happen last night?” Junmyeon asks. “Kim Junsu tried to get in on your surgery. I had my sister kick him out because of the way he’s been acting at the clinic.”

Minseok shakes her head carefully, like she’s trying not to jar anything. “I didn’t see anyone suspicious.”

Someone enters the room while they’re talking, and Minseok’s eyes widen. “But speak of the devil.”

Whirling around, Junmyeon finds herself face to face with Kim Junsu and a man wearing a badge that reads SHIM CHANGMIN.

She’s too shocked to curse, just stands stock still as they walk farther into the room.

“You could’ve at least knocked,” Minseok says in sarcastic reproach. The bravado surprises Junmyeon until she remembers that Minseok used to kill demons like these regularly. The idea that quiet, mild-mannered Minseok was once a demon hunter is always jarring to Junmyeon; she looks strong, sure, but she rarely shows a hint of malice beyond when Jongdae is at her most annoying. “It’s not like I can go anywhere.”

“You can’t,” Changmin says. He gestures at Junmyeon. “But she can.”

Junmyeon’s eyes widen even further. She makes a break for the other side of Minseok’s bed when Junsu comes for her, opening her mouth to scream, but Junsu grabs her before she gets past the foot of the bed and clamps a hand over her mouth.

Something solid and metallic presses against her neck, and she freezes.

“What are you planning?” Minseok asks, eyes shifting back and forth between Changmin and Junsu. “Take her hostage and use her against the hunters? You can’t hypnotize enough people to make it out the door, at this hour.”

“Can we not?” Changmin asks. He prowls up to the bed and looms over Minseok, caressing the top of her head. “I know an easy way to create enough chaos to distract all the nurses from us leaving with your friend.”

Minseok scowls at him. Junmyeon runs through what she knows about how demons kill people—they don’t necessarily need to be hypnotized to have their souls sucked out, but they have to be fairly still, she recalls. She hasn’t seen enough of Minseok’s post-injury range of motion to know what she’s capable of, but she doesn’t have high hopes. 

There’s also the lethal human weapon option, of course. That would leave a very suspicious corpse behind, though, and she suspects they don’t want that.

Struggling only gets the cold, metal thing against her neck pressed further into Junmyeon’s skin, and her arm twisted up her back.

Changmin leans over her. “You know, you look kinda familiar. Weren’t you a hunter, once?”

Minseok just scowls harder.

“I think you were,” Changmin continues, unheeding. “But someone ruined your ability to kill us. I bet you were in the middle of a fight one day, and you couldn’t summon a weapon when you tried, could you?”

Minseok stares up at him. He bends closer to her face. 

“Since you’re about to die, anyway, I’ll let you in on a secret—“

“Changmin-ah, shut up,” Junsu says. “This one can still hear you, and her sister’s a neurosurgeon.”

“Do you really think we’re going to let her live?” Changmin says, gesturing at Junmyeon to illustrate who he means. “It’s not worth it.”

“Still,” Junsu says.

Changmin turns his head, still leaning over Minseok, but whatever he was going to respond with is abruptly cut off. All Junmyeon sees is Minseok’s right arm flying up to his neck, a flash of blue, and then Changmin is replaced with a statue made of something gray, like clay. The statue quickly collapses, raining dust all over Minseok’s bed and the floor, the knife Minseok had used falling onto her lap.

“Fuck,” Junsu mutters, but his grip on Junmyeon doesn’t loosen. He starts to back toward the door slowly, and Junmyeon’s eyes widen.

Minseok’s widen as well, and she screams at exactly the same time that another scream sounds behind Junmyeon. 

It’s Sehun, Junmyeon registers as she’s whirled around and forced through the door with a gun at her throat. Sehun stands frozen outside the door, looking fresh-faced and horrified. 

“Don’t move,” Junsu says. “Any closer, and I’ll shoot her.”

A crowd of people is staring in their direction from the hospital waiting room, but only a few staff have come closer. Junmyeon shudders. She can see a nurse at the nurse station calling the police, and she wonders how much help they’ll be. If they can’t kill Junsu, does that mean he’ll just brush on past them when they come? Junmyeon can’t imagine they’ll make it very far down the street on foot like this.

They shuffle slowly for the front door, and Junmyeon watches the horrified faces of people in the ER waiting room as she’s escorted by. She doesn’t see an out, can’t really think past the gun being pressed to her throat. Self-defense against abductors with guns isn’t something she ever thought she’d need to know. 

The first set of automatic doors slide open as they approach, and then the second. When they reach the street, Junmyeon’s heart sinks; Junsu doesn’t try to take her down the sidewalk but instead nudges her toward a glossy black car waiting at the front of the queue. A man dives into the driver’s seat when he sees them, and then Junmyeon is being forced into the back seat. She tries to struggle when Junsu can’t stay at her back, knocking his gun arm to the side and trying to get him to drop it, but he frees his arm easily from her grip and backhands her with the gun. Bruising pain sends Junmyeon reeling against the driver side door. It’s so disorienting that she doesn’t move as the door slams and the car begins to move. 

“That’ll teach you to struggle,” Junsu says. 

Her wrists are tugged behind her, and a pair of cold metal handcuffs are wrapped around them. The sound of police sirens approaches them. Junmyeon turns to look, heart rising for a moment, but the two cars closest behind them are only taxis. Farther back, she sees the police pull up to the front of the hospital. They’re already turning onto another street as the valet gestures toward them, hospital entrance slipping out of sight. There’s no way the cops saw what was happening. 

“I got these from a hot cop I seduced once,” Junsu sneers in her ear. “She was tasty. I wonder how you’ll taste.”

Junmyeon wants to retch, but she stifles the urge in favor of watching the streets out the window to get a feel for where they’re going. It’s the wrong direction for the house they’d been watching.

“What happened to Changmin?” The driver asks. Junmyeon hasn’t gotten a good look at his face, but she has a feeling that she knows who this is.

“Dead,” Junsu says. “He was leaning over Kim Minseok gloating about her lost powers and she knifed him. Her powers don’t seem very lost.”

Probably-Kim Jaejoong sighs. “I always told that asshole that his cockiness would be the death of him.”

Junsu hums. “It’s worth noting, though. I know we got to her. The implant must have failed in the accident. Could be trouble for us.”

Implants. Junmyeon remembers a mention of Korean hunters losing their ability to summon weapons, and she also remembers Junsu saying something about neurosurgeons. If she gets out of this alive, she’ll have to make sure to ask for the imaging they did of Minseok’s head and neck after the accident.

“Yeah, we’re fucked,” Probable Jaejoong says. He doesn’t sound very concerned. “It’s too bad. We had such a good thing going.”

“It’s a shame,” Junsu says. 

“Hey, Junsu,” The driver’s eyes flick up to look at them in the rearview mirror. “Did you blindfold her? You need to blindfold her.”

Junmyeon looks desperately out at the streets and commits the last landmark she sees to memory before Junsu is yanking her down onto the seat and wrapping a scarf around her eyes. The world goes dark. 

Junsu ties it tightly enough that she can’t even open her eyes, but Junmyeon knows from mishaps in the bedroom that it would be easy enough to knock off with a little friction. The gun must be her incentive not to do that.

There’s rustling in her purse, and then the sound of the window opening.

“The fuck, Junsu? Did you just throw her phone out the window?”

“Those things are easy to track,” Junsu says. “Especially since the police are after us now, too.”

“How are we going to contact the fucking hunters to make demands now?”

“We’ll call Kim Minseok’s hospital room,” Junsu says. “Easy.”

Junmyeon wonders what they’re hoping to get out of this. If they’re trying to get safe passage away from Zitao and other hunters who know their identities, it seems to her that it would be easier to try to slip away unnoticed than to call everyone’s attention to them—including the police—by taking hostages.

As if he read Junmyeon’s mind, Junsu says, “What the fuck are you doing, Jaejoong? You just missed the on-ramp.”

“You just ran out of a busy hospital with a gun to someone’s throat. That changes our plan a bit,” Jaejoong says.

“You’re just using this as an excuse to do what _you_ wanted to do to begin with, aren’t you?” Junsu asks.

“Are you gonna fight me on it?” Jaejoong says. “You don’t have Changmin backing you up anymore.”

“Yeah, and it’s an _even fucking dumber_ idea now that we don’t have Changmin and Yoochun. They brought in Zhang Yixing, and that skinny bitch who visited the hospital with the rest of them was a hunter too, mark my words.”

“So we get to take out three instead of two,” Jaejoong says. “Do you really want to let them live? They know who we are now, and they’re not going to stop hunting us until we’re dead.”

Junmyeon shudders. If she tries to read things into what they’re saying, Jaejoong’s plan sounds like a trap for Zitao.

“Should you be saying this in front of our hostage?” Junsu asks. 

“We don’t have to let her talk to them,” Jaejoong says. “She can demonstrate she’s alive even if we gag her if we send a video call. Or we can just send a timestamped picture.”

There’s silence for a moment, then Junsu starts to bargain. “Look, can we at least stick to the getting out of town part?”

“We can once we get rid of this car,” Jaejoong grumbles. “Somebody could’ve gotten the license plate back there. I’ve still got Yunho’s in my garage.”

“And going to your house right now is a good idea?” 

“Only the hunters know I’m involved at the moment, and I just lost the cab they were following us in. We’ll be fine. The hospital won’t notice I’m missing until I’m due to show up for a shift.”

As hard as she tries to follow along and try to come up with some kind of plan, Junmyeon knows she’s out of her league. Strategizing is for Minseok, Zitao, and Sehun; Junmyeon is better at memorization and attention to detail. That’s why she’s a doctor. 

But it’s clear that Jaejoong wants to use her to bait Zitao and the other hunters into a trap, and Junmyeon knows that Jaejoong is a challenge for Zitao. It changes things that two other hunters are involved, but how much?

She wonders how many broken bones she’d suffer if she opened the car door and let herself fall into the street right here, and if she’d be hit by any oncoming cars. Sehun would kill her if she died, she thinks. Oddly, one thought that keeps circling through her brain in between all the other thoughts is that Sehun’s fears are all coming true. Somehow she feels guilty about that, like she somehow chose to get herself abducted.

So she waits, hoping she won’t have to do anything too drastic.

Eventually they turn and slow down on what must be a side street. Junmyeon twists, getting her fingers around the door handle, but it’s locked. Wondering if Junsu is watching her, she tries feeling around for the lock. There’s a whole lot of smooth plasticky material, with misleading nooks and crannies. 

Something rocks under her finger, finally. Her burgeoning feelings of triumph are almost immediately crushed, though, when tugging the handle still does nothing.

She hears a laugh from the other side of the car. “Hey, Jaejoong. It looks like our pediatrician forgot about child safety locks.”

Biting the inside of her cheek to keep from giving them the satisfaction of cursing, Junmyeon slouches in her seat. She focuses on regulating her diaphragm until the urge to cry fades.

Finally they come to a stop, and Junmyeon is unceremoniously dragged out of the car and shoved into a different one a few feet away.

“Okay, now we’re gonna call your girlfriend, Junmyeonnie,” Junsu says as the car backs up. “You have a gun pointed at your leg. If you try to say anything you shouldn’t, I won’t hesitate to fuck you up.”

Junmyeon nods. She can make out the sound of someone saying something on the other end of a phone, “You’ve reached Kim Minseok’s room. This is Sehun speaking.”

“I’d like to speak to Huang Zitao, please,” Junsu says, like he’s calling to talk to a business.

“Zitao isn’t here. Where’s Junmyeon? Is she okay?”

Sehun voice is high and stiff. She sounds terrified.

“She’s here,” Junsu presses the phone to Junmyeon’s chin. “Say something, Junmyeon.”

“Sehun,” Junmyeon says, pausing after the one word to suck in a breath. She doesn’t know what to say, just what will get her shot. “I love you. Tell Minseok she better take good care of you when she can walk again.

Based on the lack of bullets in her leg, Junmyeon assumes that wasn’t too incriminating.

“Don’t even think about dying, Kim Junmyeon,” Sehun says, voice shaking. “I’ll kill you.”

“Give us what we want and she doesn’t have to die,” Junsu says.

“And what is that?” Sehun clips out.

“It’s very simple,” Junsu says. “We just want safe passage. Tell Zitao and her friends to let us get out of town and stop chasing us, and she’ll get her girlfriend back.”

Junmyeon listens bitterly to his lies.

“Where are we going to find her?” Sehun asks.

“We’ll call back with that information when she’s there,” Junsu responds.

Then the car falls silent. Junmyeon assumes he’s hung up.

“Where _are_ they going to find her?” Junsu asks Jaejoong.

“Exactly where we were going to leave her to begin with,” Jaejoong says. “We’ll just stick around instead of leaving before they arrive.”

That’s all the information Junmyeon gets. They drive, the car eventually speeding up to highway speed and staying that way for some time. She can’t keep track of the time without clocks or visual cues. Trying to figure out which direction they’re going is fairly useless as well—all she can come up with is that they’re probably not driving west, or the sun would be coming through her window and baking her in her coat.

The road noise lulls her into a numb stupor after a while, like her brain is simply too tired to keep panicking. It’s not doing her any good. They pull off the highway and onto winding roads that make Junmyeon sick to her stomach with the blindfold preventing her from seeing where they’re going.

They stop when the road gets bouncy and crunchy, some the muffled crunching of snow and some the harsher crunch of rocky dirt. Junmyeon is escorted out of the car and forced to kneel in the dirt. Someone grabs her ankles and slides something over them. When she tries to move her feet apart, the something clinks and stops her.

“Can’t have you running away,” Junsu’s voice says with a laugh. “We’ll be in shooting distance, by the way, so no funny business.”

Then the car doors close, and the car crunches away from her. She hears the sound of doors slamming again only minutes later; she wonders if there are neighbors, or if her captors simply didn’t go very far, and she decides that they probably wouldn’t have left her tied up outside in full view of any neighbors.

For a few moments, she just kneels and listens and thinks. She hears the sound of a door opening and closing, this time the creaky scrape of wood on wood instead of the metal and rubber sounds of a car door. 

After that, it’s quiet. The air is chilly on her bare hands, and cold dampness is seeping into her pants at the knees. She wonders idly how long her coat will keep her warm, hopes they’ll get on with calling Zitao quickly. She’d decided way back in medical school that most gunshot wounds were a preferable way to die than hypothermia, and she hasn’t changed her mind since.

Ideally, though, she would prefer not to die at all. She’s just not sure how to make that happen.

She wonders where she is. She can smell pine trees, so she assumes somewhere in the mountains. That’s not much to go on. It would be easy enough to knock off her blindfold, but she’s not sure they wouldn’t shoot her for that.

After a while of alternating between panic, tears, and emptiness, she decides she doesn’t care that much if they shoot her now, if it means assuaging her curiosity. Squeezing the side of her face and a shoulder together, she twists her head and bounces her shoulder until the scarf comes loose, then shakes it down to her neck.

Sure enough, she’s on a sloped driveway surrounded by pine trees. There’s a little log cabin in the western style behind her, with round logs linked together at the corners, the gaps between them filled with whatever you use to seal the gaps in linked logs. Junmyeon doesn’t know these things. 

There’s fairly thick snow cover under the trees, but it’s been melted away by the sun in the middle of the driveway, where Junmyeon is kneeling.

By the time a car comes crunching up the long driveway, Junmyeon’s hands and knees hurt from the cold.

She doesn’t recognize the car, some plain silver sedan. It stops a distance from her, and a bunch of women spill out. She counts Zitao, Yixing, Krystal, and Sehun. Why did they bring Sehun? 

Sehun starts to run toward Junmyeon, calling her name, but Yixing stops her. 

“Don’t come close,” Junmyeon shouts. “They’re here. They have guns.”

She’s worried for a moment that they might be too far away still to hear her, but they all stop at that and talk to each other. Despite Junsu’s earlier warning, Junmyeon also isn’t shot for speaking out.

The whole time, though, Junmyeon is aware that her period of usefulness as bait is coming to an end. They won’t kill her before anyone approaches, but she assumes her placement is within shooting distance from the cabin. 

After a moment of conferring, the group all pile back into the car. It hurtles up the driveway toward Junmyeon, off to one side, then swings to a sudden stop perpendicular to the driveway just past Junmyeon. Three pops ring out from the house, followed by the clink of bullets hitting metal.

If she didn’t know it was a gun, Junmyeon would’ve thought the pops came from firecrackers. The sound is unfairly small for something that does so much damage, she thinks.

People drop into the dirt around Junmyeon, hiding behind the body of the car. The three hunters peek over the edge of the hood after several moments of silence, then duck down again when another shot rings out.

Sehun is all over Junmyeon instantly. 

“Are you okay?” She asks. Zitao and the others look at Junmyeon as well.

“Physically, yes,” Junmyeon says. “For now. What the hell, Sehun? Why are you here?”

Sehun glares at her.

“We can talk about that later,” Zitao says. “Right now, Yixing and Krystal and I need to get up to the house.”

“How are you going to do that?” Junmyeon is incredulous. “The house is raining bullets.”

Something glows purple in Krystal’s hands, forming into a large circle. “Shields?”

“Can’t you just wait until they’re out of ammunition?” Junmyeon says. “Wouldn’t that be safer?”

She thinks that’s what they do in the crime dramas. Keep track of ammunition used, strike when they’re low. Or something.

Yixing shrugs. “We don’t know how much they have.”

“And you can’t summon guns?” Junmyeon’s been wondering about this.

“We can,” Zitao says. “But the ammunition never shows up. Same with crossbows. It’s one weapon at a time. Best guess is the ammunition confuses that.”

“We also can’t summon weapons while we’ve got shields out,” Yixing adds. “Or body armor.”

Junmyeon feels faint. “That’s asinine.”

“Asiwhat?” Zitao says. Her nonplussed expression clashes with her tense posture. Even her hair is pulled into a tight, no-frills bun, something Junmyeon has never seen on her before. She’s lost the sweatshirt she was wearing earlier, so she’s just in her T-shirt and track pants.

Junmyeon shakes her head. “Not important. I’ll stop distracting you.”

With a curt nod, Zitao says, “Okay. Stay down behind the car.”

She turns to the other two and gestures, and they all run out from behind the car, summoning shields as they go. Junmyeon watches until they’re gone, then closes her eyes for a moment. The image of Zitao lunging out from behind the car is burned onto the back of her eyelids.

The gunshots resume and continue periodically for some time, with silence in between. Sehun takes advantage of one such silence to tell Junmyeon to turn around. She starts jostling Junmyeon’s handcuffs once Junmyeon has bounce-twisted enough for her to reach them.

After just a few seconds, there’s a click. Junmyeon tugs her hand loose while Sehun goes to work on one of her ankles.

“Since when do you know how to do that?” Junmyeon asks. 

“I don’t,” Sehun says. “I was just guessing. Seems weird that they make handcuffs you can pick with a hairpin, though. Not good for arresting people with long hair.”

There’s another click, and another, and Sehun finishes by removing the last cuff from Junmyeon’s other wrist.

From inside the house, they hear more gunfire, a female shout, and then a male one. Then there’s a clatter, and a ton of feet crunching across the gravel quickly combined with a lot of shouting. Junmyeon cringes against Sehun’s side and tangles their hands together. 

Someone comes rolling over the hood of the car, Hollywood movie style. Everything slows down Hollywood movie style, too, so that each observation Junmyeon makes echoes around in her head for a moment before the next comes along.

The someone is a man. All of Junmyeon’s friends here are women. She gets a glimpse of his face, a glimpse of a gun, and even though she can see him lunging toward her clearly enough to know she’s about to be taken hostage _again_ , she’s frozen in place.

Jaejoong grabs one of her arms and yanks her upright. One of his arms wraps over her clavicle to keep her in place, and the other holds the gun to her temple. It’s terrifying. Junmyeon knows that it’s terrifying. 

But the thing is, Junmyeon has been terrified _all fucking day._ And maybe that’s why she’s suddenly furious.

“Are you _fucking kidding me_ ,” Junmyeon spits. 

Zitao and Krystal stand frozen several feet away. Junmyeon doesn’t see Yixing at all. She hopes the scream she heard earlier wasn’t Yixing dying. 

Zitao takes a tentative step toward them, and Junmyeon feels a faintly familiar tug at the back of her throat.

_Fuck_ , she thinks. 

“Keep moving and I’ll keep eating her soul,” Jaejoong says.

Further enraged and certain that she’ll die if she doesn’t move, Junmyeon tries to drop out of his arms, but the one around her neck is too tight.

“And if _you_ keep moving, I’ll fucking shoot you,” Jaejoong murmurs in her ear.

Junmyeon freezes. “You’re fucking scum.”

“Thanks,” Jaejoong sneers.

There’s a glowing green sword in Zitao’s hands. There are a few holes in her clothing, and a dark patch on her pants that Junmyeon guesses is blood. She’s holding the sword upright, like she’s ready to charge with it, but she’s still frozen in place. Her eyes are focused like lasers on Jaejoong and Junmyeon, but then they angle up ever so slightly.

The gun suddenly clatters to the ground, and Jaejoong is yanked to the side and onto the ground. Sehun scrabbles over his body for the gun, and he jostles her off, grabbing for it himself. Rather than leave it to fate, Junmyeon dives in for her own attempt at grabbing it, shoving a knee into Jaejoong’s shoulder in the process.

Sehun’s fingers close around the gun first, send it skittering off under the car. 

Junmyeon’s knee suddenly hits the ground just as she’s deciding that her next plan is to get as far away from Jaejoong as she can. It’s best to leave him to the professionals. When she turns, she finds two glowing swords sticking out of a mound of gray dust. 

Zitao and Yixing stand over them panting. Yixing has a clear bullet wound in her upper arm, Zitao one in her thigh.

“What about Junsu?” Junmyeon asks.

“Dead,” Zitao says. She proceeds to crumple on top of Junmyeon.

 

Far too close to an hour later, Junmyeon finds herself holding Zitao’s hand in a dated operating room belonging to the Gookil Hospital emergency department while Lu Han pulls a bullet from her leg. Due to lack of space, Yixing is sitting across the room in a chair with Yifan stooped over to take care of her arm wound. 

It had been a long, frustrating ride, with Junmyeon sitting between Zitao and Yixing so that she could keep an eye on both of their wounds, wishing she could nag about going to a nearby hospital instead of driving all the way back to Seoul. Unfortunately, she knew that showing up to a hospital with gunshot wounds would raise a lot of questions—Junmyeon herself had never seen one before—and nobody’s injury was quite life-threatening enough to require it.

Zitao is shockingly quiet, now, for someone who’d cried her eyes out on Junmyeon’s shoulder for half the ride. She grits her teeth a few times and grunts, but it’s shockingly calm for the amount of pain she’s in. 

Yifan, meanwhile, is ranting about the car with dents from bullets sitting in the parking lot while she works, saying that it’s bad for business. Eventually Krystal leaves ot move it.

“That’s going to be so expensive to fix,” Yixing whines. “I can’t report it to my insurance. Maybe I should go drive it into a wall?”

With a grimace, Junmyeon says, “I can chip in for repairs. Please don’t harm yourself to get insurance to pay out.”

“Speaking of explaining things,” Sehun pipes up from the corner. “We need to make up a story for the police, don’t we?”

If she didn’t know any better, Junmyeon might think that Zitao’s groan in response to Sehun was louder than any of her pained noises over the bullet in her thigh.

“What exactly happened after Junsu grabbed me?” Junmyeon asks.

“Tao and Yixing saw him outside the doors and followed you guys in a taxi for a bit,” Sehun says. “But then they lost you. The police came to talk to me and Minseok while they were doing that, so we told them Junsu came in and put a gun to your throat and we didn’t know why.”

They concoct a story about Junsu letting Junmyeon go outside of Jaejoong’s place, and Junmyeon getting lost looking for a phone. Once Zitao and Yixing are patched up, Junmyeon delivers the story to the police still keeping watch in Haesung Hospital along with Sehun and Krystal, the two members of their party who look the least like they just participated in a gun fight. 

 

 

Weeks later, Junmyeon and Sehun host a welcome home party for Minseok in their apartment, where they’ve convinced Minseok to move until she’s back on her feet. Junmyeon drafts Zitao, Lu Han, and Jongdae to help her with preparations while Sehun and Minseok’s family handle Minseok’s discharge.

“Isn’t it kind of weird to draft half your guests to help prepare for a party?” Jongdae asks from the kitchen, where she’s assisting Kyungsoo with heating some hors d’oeuvres. 

Junmyeon rolls her eyes. She knows by now that Jongdae likes to be helpful about as much as she likes to whine. “Zitao pretty much lives here, anyway, and you’d be more upset if I denied you the chance to whine at me about making you help.”

With one hand holding a banner in place just a little bit above her head, Junmyeon struggles to pull out a piece of tape. She manages it by lifting the tape dispenser over her head and sparing some fingers from the banner to get a length out, but then it gets twisted. She can’t get it onto the cutting edge to break it off, either, so after a moment of struggling she asks Zitao to get her the scissors from the kitchen.

Without ever leaving the living room, Zitao limps over to Junmyeon’s side. She’s tall enough to reach the corner of the banner from the floor, when Junmyeon had to get a footstool to do this. 

There’s a pop, and then Zitao is flicking a small green dagger through the tape. With another pop, it disappears. 

“What was that noise?” Jongdae calls from the kitchen.

Glaring down at Zitao, Junmyeon mouths, _What are you doing? She could have seen you!_

Zitao just smirks up at Junmyeon, wrapping long arms around her hips, and she looks so proud of herself that Junmyeon’s glare melts away in record time. Enjoying her rare chance to feel taller than Zitao, she leans down to land a quick kiss on Zitao’s lips, feeling immeasurably happy.

It’s Lu Han who pauses her work to answer Jongdae with, “I don’t think you want to know. Junmyeon and Tao are being gross in here.”

“Oh,” Jongdae says. “Damn, I was hoping it was a bottle of wine opening.”

“That can be arranged,” Junmyeon says.

She hops down off of her stool and tangles her hand with Zitao’s while she surveys the room. In a few months, she’ll ask Zitao to move in with her for real and go part-time at the martial arts school, but not today. They may not have the kind of time that Junmyeon likes to think they have, but she refuses to rush things for the sake of borrowed trouble. 

Things have calmed down in the past few weeks, Zitao’s injuries still forcing her to take it easy, but the sum total of demons they took out apparently doesn’t quite explain the outbreak of deaths the hunting organizations have noticed, especially not when the recently deceased demons weren’t causing the types of deaths that would register on anyone’s radar. Zitao’s work isn’t over. 

People float into the apartment in small numbers, though, and for now things are pleasant. Maybe that’s all anyone can really hope for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, comments make me super happy.


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